Patti Smith Artist Quotations

When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist.

I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made.

A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.

I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.

Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.

I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. to break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not ones race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.

As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.

No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.

An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.'

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.