Patti Smith Quotes

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

When I know I'm going to work on a cover, I practically run to the computer! After working with words for so long, it's lovely to do something that's creative yet also the professional equivalent of scribbling in your own coloring book.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

Painting, music, photography, and visual art have been creative forms of expression for me for decades.

I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.

I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.

I found that the only thing I felt passionate about drawing were words.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

I don't enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me.

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible.

I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.

I believe that writing for me is in a way like wisdom; in that as soon as you feel like you've got it figured out you stop growing and maybe even lose something.

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

Every writer has to write his speech.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art