Patti Smith

Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.

You can't change the world; you can't fix the whole environment. But you can recycle. You can turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. You can do small things.

As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the '70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.

It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.

My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations. She's an environmentalist, she plays piano, she's raising money for the earthquake victims in Nepal. Every day she surprises me and teaches me something.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.

I was a sickly child, not very strong physically. I wasn't really the greatest in school. I didn't really excel in anything particularly. But I was happy with who I was.

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.

Artists, musicians, scientists - if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it's often something that you don't have a choice in. You have to do it.

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.

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.

For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.

I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.

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.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

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

Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.