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 personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.
Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
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.
I don't stay in one discipline because it's more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was 'Just Kids,' for which I had absolutely no expectations.
As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister.
An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.
All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.
You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie.
My style says, 'Look at me, don't look at me.'
Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.
I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy.
I didn't know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.
An artist wears his work in place of wounds.
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
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.
The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do...
Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.
