Patti Smith Quotes

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

I'd like to think you don't stop being creative once you get happy.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

I think the way kids create is so inspiring. They're drawing a picture? They love the picture they drew; they're not tortured about it.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

For me, love is happiness and inspiration.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

Being at the genesis of the creative process is definitely something I want to keep doing. It's just such a great buzz.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

There's this element of surprise when you're writing songs, like it's something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it's just exciting. And that's why I keep writing - because I like that feeling.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

I love to go to the studio and stay there 10 or 12 hours a day. I love it. What is it? I don't know. It's life.

Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

Even at your best, the creative moments are still kind of fleeting.

I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.