Patti Smith Quotes

I always wanted to be different. I always wanted to be first.

I've never been bothered about being the highest wicket-taker in the world or the best South African bowler in the world.

I feel I am an aristocrat in my field of endeavor. My being part of 'Bonanza' was like Isaac Stern sitting in with Lawrence Welk.

I know a lot of famous people didn't do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that... but that's not going to be me. I'm not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it.

I am not in the roll of common men.

I think there is a blossom about me of something more distinguished than the generality of mankind.

Maccarinelli thinks he can use me to make a name for himself, but that is not going to happen. He has made his fame by fighting nobodies. I've fought all the way to the top against top contenders.

in Los Angeles ... was the thinking-est crowd on earth: how to get ahead, how to mold a better body, how to have a better relationship, how to score, earn, fight, win, get published, be a star.

People think I'm crazy, but I'm in demand.

Success has a lot of things that go along with it and I haven't experienced any personal resentment. I can't control any of that and I try not to worry about it. I hope that's not the case, you know. Most of the writers that I know and artists that I know understand what was going on. I think there's just as many things going on in the awards process that have to do with the show having won a few times.

It's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for "realistic" goals, paradoxically making them the most time-consuming and energy consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 than it is $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

I think now the music is good. I tell people all the time who like to be in the music business you got to have a hit record.

I know it sounds selfish, wanting to do something no one else has done. But that's what you're out here for - to separate yourself from everyone else.

People don't pay much attention to you when you are second best. I wanted to see what it felt like to be number one.

There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.

I think Americans love success - but hate the people who have it.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

I'm sure people would argue this, but I want to be different in everything I do. I don't think I've been the same in anything I've done, and I want to keep that up.

I talked to people that I'd done theater with, older actors and stuff. There's a lot of people who go into the business, and they must think they're good, or they wouldn't be in it. Why do you think that you're good enough to go into the business and make money at it? So I really wanted to ask myself that question a lot. Because it was an important kind of thing that I was going to do. I really wanted to do it, I loved it, and I thought that I was good enough that I could make money at it. And that's really what it came down to.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

I think luck is a big part of people who are successful in L.A.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

I am No. 8 in the world. I am not No. 100.

Records are made to be broken.