Great Throughts Treasury

"My mother taught me to pray, taught by her own mother was a dude like this: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray my soul to Jesus for protection. At night, I knelt beside my bed, small repeating his words, he has not dropped the cigarette from his mouth and waits for standing by my side, she would listen to me. My only wish was to pray, but the words would confuse me and my mother did not question the amount of rain. What is the soul? What is color? My soul for being so naughty I was afraid you would not come back asleep after sneaking away. I fall asleep I'd do my best to avoid; my soul in me, so I could have kept where it belongs."

"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."

"My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers."

"My style says, 'Look at me, don't look at me.'"

"Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire."

"No one expected me. Everything awaited me."

"My sunglasses are like my guitar."

"Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.'"

"No one would see what [Robert] had seen, no one would understand. He?d had it all his life, but in the past he tried to make up for it, as if it were his fault. He compensated for this with a sweet nature, seeking approval from his father, from his teachers, from his peers. He wasn?t certain whether he was a good or bad person? But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize."

"No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist."

"No one was waiting for me. But I expect everything."

"Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach Land of a Thousand Dances: she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot. Another great woman writer is Iris Sarazan, who wrote The Runaway. She considered herself a mare, a wild runaway. She was a really intelligent girl stuck in all these convents with a hungry mind. I identify with her 'cause of her hunger to go beyond herself. She wound up in prison, but she escaped and wrote some great books before kicking off. Her books aren't page after page of her beating her breast about how shitty she's been treated, they're books about her exciting telescoping plans of escape. Rhythm, great wild rhythm... The French poet, Rimbaud, predicted that the next great crop of writers would be women. He was the first guy who ever made a big women's liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men they're really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely."

"Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve."

"One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal."

"Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music."

"People say beware, but I don't care. Their words are just rules and regulations to me."

"People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone's vision, because in the end, that's what you got: your clay in someone else's hands."

"People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything."

"Paths that cross will cross again."

"People have the power to redeem the work of fools."

"People wouldn't know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them."

"Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."

"Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book."

"Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world."

"Pissing in a river, watching it rise."

"Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not."

"Robert took to describing himself as evil, partially joking or just needing to be different? ?You know you don?t have to be evil to be different,? I said. ?You are different. Artists are their own breed.?"

"Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste."

"Robert trusted the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world? He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination."

"Robert would often use [the word magic] to describe us, about a successful poem or drawing, and ultimately in choosing a photograph on a contact sheet. ?That?s the one with the magic,? he would say. Robert ?approached dressing like living art.? Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse? He transformed a ring of keys, a kitchen knife, or a simple wooden frame into art. He loved his work and he loved his things? ?He was the artist of my life,? Patti says."

"Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph."

"Say anything, he said. You can't make a mistake when you improvise."

"Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?"

"Robert was increasingly despondent with his paid work. When he came home he was exhausted and dispirited and for a time stopped creating. I implored him to quit. His job and scant paycheck were not worth the sacrifice? I had no regrets taking on the job as the breadwinner. My temperament was sturdier. I could still create at night and I was proud to provide a situation allowing him to do his work without compromise."

"Rock Hard."

"Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca."

"Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient."

"Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."

"So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger."

"Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear everyday."

"Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life."

"Sure I destroyed my guitar at every concert, but it was okay, because I'd always get a shiny new one the very next day."

"The city was a real city, shifty and sexual. I was lightly jostled by small herds of flushed young sailors looking for action on Forty-Second Street, with it rows of X-rated movie houses, brassy women, glittering souvenir shops, and hot-dog vendors. I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant?s Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters. The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects. I walked for hours from park to park. In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself ? This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem oppressive to anyone."

"The child, mystified by the commonplace, moves effortlessly into the strange."

"The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children."

"That's something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view."

"The first record's like a book. It's like a poetry book."

"The hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new. - Patti Smith, Dream Of Life"

"The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times."

"The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn't an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits."