Patti Smith Quotes

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

The more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragile I am, the more I become an artist.

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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

I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.

For me, when we came out with a TV show, my HBO show, so much of the feedback was, "How do I do it?" And my response was always the same: "Just make something." Stop talking about it. You do in a way that the work takes on a life of its own. Like the "Signature" series [(2008), in which the artist trekked across the United States in the shape of his own signature] was a simple concept that became this story about the people you met along the way.

Writing a poem is discovering.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art.

I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?'

The Greeks said the artist doesn't actually have to travel and look around. You stay where God has put you, and you dig as deep as you can. This is what I've done.

The artist in me cries out for design.

I love producing! It's so much fun to start with a blank canvas and create the picture you want to create and see it all come together.

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

I can obviously relate to a character who is an artist, because the creative process is a big part of my life.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.