Patti Smith Quotes

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

My life's far too complicated to be summed up in one song. It would take 20 just to represent one single day.

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

Life is too complex to compress into soundbites. Every situation is different.

There is no other who experiences your thoughts or your feelings.

That's my favorite kind of television, where it's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow. It's like life. You deal with one thing in your life, 500 others rear their head.

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart!

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.

For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.

You live your life between your ears.

Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

I don't know why, but life is usually more complicated than the plans that we make.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.

Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.