Patti Smith Quotes

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. For nothing is more precious than the life force and may the love of that force guide you as you go.

...the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

Everything comes down so pasteurized
everything comes down 16 degrees
they say your amplifier is too loud
turn your amplifier down
are we high all alone on our knees
memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection

I'm more materialistic about myself than I am about objects

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.