top of page
"Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Artist quotes

"Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I've never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line's always been really blurred for me. I'll hang out with them after the show. I'll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I'll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes."

"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

"I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor."

"Seeing how those companies operate, it didn't amount to a massive vote of confidence in their artists. There was talk of me going to Columbia after that, but nothing happened. I got disillusioned, and I pulled back."

"Negroes at last were on Broadway, and there to stay. We were artists and we were going a long way."

"An artist can be truly evaluated only after he is dead. At the very 11th hour, he might do something that will eclipse everything else."

"However, the radio and national media depend much more on the hype from a good record label, and from a " buzz " about a band, then from just one or two good shows. There are a lot of artists that have a ton of good press going for them, and still do not make it big in the US."
Explore more quotes by Patti Smith

"I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife."

"I'm not afraid of terrorism at all. I'm afraid of loss of our freedom, loss of mobility, loss of global comradeship."

"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."

"Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person."

"The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan."
bottom of page