Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPunk Singer
Date of Birth30 December 1946
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
goal people want
One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal.
long people needs
Well, I'm not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I'm performing, that's what I'm doing. If I'm not, I don't long for it. I don't need the approval of an audience, or applause.
artist long poet
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
parent sophisticated educated
My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers.
angel boys looks
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?
two rocks people
What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
war sibling kids
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.
children book years
When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them.
writing quiet closets
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
letting-go sadness artist
...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. to break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not ones race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.
art rocks who-i-am
Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
mother book want
I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.
want hiding
It got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe)
rocks needs ifs
If you don't have what you need, just rock with what you've got!