Quote

I didn't have any career design. I was not thinking about publishing or doing a record. I was just working. I was evolving. I wanted to really comprehend what I was doing before stepping too far out.

Patti Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Patti Smith
Age: 77
Born: 1946
Born: December 30
Composer
Drawer
Guitarist
Human Rights Activist
Musician
Photographer
Poet
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Visual Artist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Patricia Lee Smith
Really
Record
Thinking
Career
Careers
Design
Evolving
Records
Stepping
Working
Comprehend
Didn
Publishing
Wanted
Evolve

More quotes by Patti Smith

Image
I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection
Patti Smith
Image
That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.
Patti Smith
Image
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.
Patti Smith
Image
What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant.
Patti Smith
Image
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.
Patti Smith
Image
In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.
Patti Smith
Image
I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.
Patti Smith
Image
I don't think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it's the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others... I don't think any one faction can be blamed for a person's self destruction - a certain amount of that has to be innate.
Patti Smith
Image
I've lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.
Patti Smith
Image
I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.
Patti Smith
Image
I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.
Patti Smith
Image
I hate to be enclosed. I don't like bathroom doors - I don't shut them. In fact, in my house, I have no doors.
Patti Smith
Image
Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
Patti Smith
Image
I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.
Patti Smith
Image
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
Patti Smith
Image
I think really that's just the basic Christian lesson that sometimes takes us years and years to understand - have equal concern for another human being as you have for yourself or perhaps even more concern for another human being than you have for yourself.
Patti Smith
Image
You don't want to OD on improvisation.
Patti Smith
Image
People say hello to me. I mean, sometimes the sanitation truck goes by and says, hey Patti.
Patti Smith
Image
I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.
Patti Smith
Image
As a child I was such an intense daydreamer I could be so gone that I had to be smacked to come back. They were really worried that I had some kind of catatonia or something because I would go so far out. Because all I wanted to do was talk to god as a child.
Patti Smith