Art Quotes by Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

— Patti Smith

“Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself?”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

“I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.”

— Patti Smith

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

“To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.”

— Patti Smith

It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.

— Patti Smith

“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist…

— Patti Smith

When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective…

— Patti Smith

“I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." - reference to Andy Warhol”

— Patti Smith

Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out…

— Patti Smith

Hung-up women can't produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain't no room for mediocre art.

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

“Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an…

— Patti Smith

Not everything we do as artists has deep intent. If we push barriers, that's great, but sometimes we just do our work.…

— Patti Smith

I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is…

— Patti Smith

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in…

— Patti Smith

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. For nothing is more…

— Patti Smith

I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation.…

— Patti Smith

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson,…

— Patti Smith

I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds…

— Patti Smith

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the…

— Patti Smith

...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal…

— Patti Smith

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The…

— Patti Smith

“An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God. The guy who built the Tower of Babel was the first artist.…

— Patti Smith

I'm old-fashioned. I think William Blake and people in the Renaissance people were multi. Look at da Vinci, he was involved in…

— Patti Smith

“Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It…

— Patti Smith

“I escaped into daydreams as I did my piecework. I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner…

— Patti Smith

It's Steven's [Sebring] view of what he saw in traveling and working with me. But on another scale, I think the film…

— Patti Smith

“I believe that we, that this planet, hasn't seen its Golden Age. Everybody says its finished ... art's finished, rock and roll…

— Patti Smith

“A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one…

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

As a citizen, hopefully I'm humanist. As an artist, I'm free.

— Patti Smith

An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.

— Patti Smith

When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing…

— Patti Smith