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 SMITHEverybody’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.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
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Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
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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.
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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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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Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
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I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
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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.
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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.
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Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)
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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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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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I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.
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One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
PATTI SMITH