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I daydreamed too much at school, I didn’t comb my hair, there was a million reasons why I upset people continuously - but I was never trying to be bad or cause a stir, that’s just the way I am. Just by being the way I am made people - and still do - perceive me as a rebel. Well, maybe I am - maybe I’m a rebel with a cause, I don’t know - but to me, even defining myself as a rebel is too confining. I don’t want to be nothing. I’m just myself.

Patti Smith, Clash Magazine Issue #75 (via indiebookclub)

(via patricialeesmith)

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I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history.
I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 
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To me, I look like I’m 12 years old but with ancient hair. I can still taste what it’s like to be a child. I can still feel the intense pain and embarrassment of being a teenager. I still have a streak of rebelliousness in me that is unwarranted and unnecessary. I still have some youthful hopes. But I possess a certain amount of resignation and weariness.

Patti Smith, 1996 (via patricialeesmith)
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I mean I can’t be the saint people dream of now. People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth. Somebody to get off on when they can’t get off on themselves. I think that’s what Mick Jagger is trying to do…what Bob Dylan seemed to be for a while. A sort of God in our image…ya know? Mick Jagger came close but he got too conscious. For a while he gave me hope… I want it to be perfect, ‘cause it’s the only religion I got…in the old days people had a Jesus and those people to embrace… They created a god with all their belief energies… and when they didn’t dig But it’s too hard now. We’re earthy people and the old saints just don’t make it, and the old God is just too far away. He don’t represent our pain no more. His words don’t shake through us no more. Any great motherfucker rock’n’roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations. We created rock’n’roll from our own image, it’s our child…

from the play cowboy mouth by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, 1971 (via patricialeesmith)
I have a copy of this from the chronicle that I cut out years ago- I just took it off my wall, finally, because I wanted to preserve it. Then I think my cat peed on it to piss me off.

I have a copy of this from the chronicle that I cut out years ago- I just took it off my wall, finally, because I wanted to preserve it. Then I think my cat peed on it to piss me off.

(via crashntumble)

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With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
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Give me a good sharp knife and a good sharp cheese and I’m a happy man.

― George R.R. Martin (via cheesenotes)
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There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.

William Gibson (Via Paris Review)
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Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties—all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

David Foster Wallace (via wordpainting) (via libraryland) (via reluctantlyromantic) (via bloodyrimbaud)