Quotes by Patti Smith

Please, no matter how we advance in technology please dont abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.

We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. Im going to remember everything and then Im going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. Thats what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

Personally, Im not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why cant things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down Desolation Row. I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

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

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one

Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

I dont fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.