Patti Smith Life Quotations

For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.

You're not a rock n' roll person four hours a day or even when you're on stage. It's become the rhythm of your whole life.

I loved being a rock and roll star, but it wasn't what I wanted in life.

Throughout my life, I happily deferred to family, companions, children.

We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.

What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.

My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.

In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot.

Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it.

Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people.

Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.

The thing is that as you grow through life, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of new ideas, all these things keeps your mind elastic.

As I go through life, I can see why my mother directed me that way, or why my father counseled me in that way. But some things you're open to when you're young, and some things you need to find out for yourself. I think that that's pretty universal.