I’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
PATTI SMITHWhat a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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I’m from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.
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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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I think it’s important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.
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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.
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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
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I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
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What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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I’m not really a nostalgic person.
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I was never a singer, I can’t play any instruments, I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn’t have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern.
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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.
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With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn’t know who to work with.
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Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.
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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
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The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
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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.
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Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
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My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn’t come anymore, but I had his support.
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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?
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Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
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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.
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I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.
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A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
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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.
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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