About Patti Smith: Patricia Lee 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.
I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.
There's always new stuff, that's for sure.
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.
If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer.
I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician.
I've always believed in having a sense of balance and stealth.
I'm not a very analytical person.
Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.
I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.
I've always thrived on the encouragement of others.
People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.
I'd just make sure with anything I say I know what I'm talking about.
My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns.
Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.
The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.
Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.'
Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.
My mother answers all my fan mail.
Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.
When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.
