Patti Smith Quotes

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Patti Smith

Profession : Musician

Birth : December 30, 1946

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Patti Smith

I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.

Patti Smith

Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more.

Patti Smith

My mother answers all my fan mail.

Patti Smith

No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.

Patti Smith

I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.

Patti Smith

Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.

Patti Smith

I was studying Francis of Assisi for quite some time, when Benedict was still the pope. And I was studying it for a song that I did for my last album, 'Banga.'

Patti Smith

I've always thrived on the encouragement of others.

Patti Smith

I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family.

Patti Smith

People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

Patti Smith

What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.

Patti Smith

When I did 'Horses,' I never expected to make another album.

Patti Smith

Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.

Patti Smith

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

Patti Smith

My sunglasses are like my guitar.

Patti Smith

My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations. She's an environmentalist, she plays piano, she's raising money for the earthquake victims in Nepal. Every day she surprises me and teaches me something.

Patti Smith

There is hardly a place in New York that you can't walk a block and a half and get a cup of coffee. Believe me, I've been all over the world. There's no place like that but New York City.

Patti Smith

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

Patti Smith

Sure I destroyed my guitar at every concert, but it was okay, because I'd always get a shiny new one the very next day.

Patti Smith