top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes

"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."

"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!"

"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."

"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."

"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."

"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."

"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."

"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."

"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
Explore more quotes by Patti Smith

"I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea."

"Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down 'Desolation Row.' I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it."

"My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled."

"In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."

"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity."
bottom of page