Patti Smith Quotes

My favourite city of all has to be Seattle as it seems to encapsulate everything that is great about both Britain and America.

It's heartening to return to live music, heartening for people like me in a band. It's a very traditional thing to return to. It re-validates the original form that we fell in love with.

To have someone play off and be with a band is more pleasurable.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.

Back then I was still listening to rhythm and blues, and my aunt took me to see a Pete Seeger concert. And it gelled. He made all the sense in the world to me. I got addicted to his albums, and then Belafonte and Odetta - they were the people who seemed to fuse things that were important to me into music. I think Pete the most because he did what he did to the point where he took those enormous risks and then paid for them.

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

It's always been my dream to be on the stage with my band, singing my music. That's always been, and always will be.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?

You shouldn't even be in a band if you can't play Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away.

Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.

I sang in the coffee houses . . . in the early 60's with no idea of success in terms of records or television. I just thought I was a storyteller. I had this deep, bassy voice. But I had incredible passion for the music I was singing.

The ideal is a synthesis of the different cultures that have come to stay in India, that have influenced Indian life, and that, in their turn, have themselves been influenced by the spirit of the soil.

When East meets West, amazing design happens. L'Alahambra rug is a marriage of the clean line and simplicity of Western graphic design meets the complexity and beauty of Eastern pattern.

I want the new band to work together for a while, and when we're ready we'll invite every major record company to see us.

I decided to build up my band in Buffalo because Buffalo was where I had originally built up my own musical strength.

I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.

Why would Roman gods want to date Chinese Canadians?

I was looking for something and I wasn't sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses, I had a psychedelic experience where I looked up at the clouds and went, 'Oh!' I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen.

If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

I've been thinking about songwriting more in terms of playing it live, and how it will sound as a band.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.