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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Patti Smith

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More Patti Smith Quotes

• 

  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?

  PATTI SMITH
  ArtPeriodPointTalkZoos
• 

  I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.

  PATTI SMITH
  LaureateLongPoet
• 

  I started resenting how much art robs from life. I’d go to a party and I couldn’t enjoy myself, even sexually. All I could think was how I was going to reinvent the experience into a piece of art.

  PATTI SMITH
  ArtPieceSexuallyThinking
• 

  To be an artist – actually, to be a human being in these times – it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

  PATTI SMITH
  ActualArtistHumanMatters
• 

  Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.

  PATTI SMITH
  ChildrenLipstickNeedRed
• 

  All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.

  PATTI SMITH
  ChildrenWantWonderful
• 

  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.

  PATTI SMITH
  PocketTwoWorld
• 

  I’m okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I’ll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I’m in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.

  PATTI SMITH
  AroundDawnRoamingWorld
• 

  The film [Dream of Life] doesn’t hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.

  PATTI SMITH
  DarknessDreamSorrow
• 

  Well, I’m not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I’m performing, that’s what I’m doing. If I’m not, I don’t long for it. I don’t need the approval of an audience, or applause.

  PATTI SMITH
  LimelightLongNeedPeoplePerform
• 

  I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.

  PATTI SMITH
  CommunicateEmbraceNeedPeople
• 

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

  PATTI SMITH
  LonelinessSpaceUnderstood
• 

  Everybody’s got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock’n’roll, political activismand it’s got to be done over and over again. It’s like eating: you can’t say,’Oh, I ate yesterday’.You have to eat again.

  PATTI SMITH
  PoliticalRockYesterday
• 

  For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.

  PATTI SMITH
  GiveHoroscopeMotherYear
• 

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

  PATTI SMITH
  ArtistHungeredProofStuff
• 

  Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

  PATTI SMITH
  PathQuestionsTwistedUnanswered