I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

— Patti Smith

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

— Patti Smith

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

— Patti Smith

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

— Patti Smith

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

— Patti Smith

It ain't so easy writing about nothing

— Patti Smith

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

— Patti Smith

It's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

— Patti Smith

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

— Patti Smith

I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.

— Patti Smith