Patti Smith Quotes

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

I've learned a lot about the limits of what I can do, as an artist, or what I'm willing to do. It's a lot of responsibility to carry a show and to speak to people on different levels.

I too have my own demons, and I have struggled. I've made my own mistakes, and I'm not proud of them.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

To be an artist is to doubt yourself and try harder.

I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person.

What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.

Most artists I know consider themselves to be phonies, along with the feeling that there's something that you're doing is essential, essential to communicate, and deeply, deeply real.

You can't always do that which you can do in your sleep. That doesn't fulfill an artist. You're looking for places where you can grow, in some way, whether it's a large way or a small way. I want to grow as an artist, as a person and as a woman. I want to enjoy myself and my life and the company that I'm keeping. I want to bring something to the table that's different than anything else would bring, but that has its place and value, and then keep moving.

I definitely want to work with people who are artists and who are interested in being their best version of themselves.

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

I will push myself in different ventures that I believe will make me a better artist, dancer and person.

Singing other people's material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.

I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist. And that just kind of kept honing itself around film and getting closer to film.

Sometimes I even amaze myself, and sometimes I do things that make me want to punch myself in the face.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

I love develop as an artist, to push my envelope, to grow, to make mistakes, to learn from them and to try and be the very best that I can be while I'm on this earth.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

I feel it's my social responsibility to shine a light on areas that don't get seen. My personal feeling is that it's an artist's responsibility to be engaged with the culture. And when the culture is going through turmoil, I think an artist can't ignore that. I don't feel that every artist has to be politically engaged, but I can't imagine that you can be an active participant of this culture and not in some way reflect that in the work you are creating.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Self improvement is masturbation.