With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn’t know who to work with.
PATTI SMITHI 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.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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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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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.
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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’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
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I’m not really a nostalgic person.
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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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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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Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
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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.
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The film [Dream of Life] doesn’t hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.
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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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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 -
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.
PATTI SMITH -
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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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.
PATTI SMITH -
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
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I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
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I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH -
I don’t know why, the very first word on my very first record is ‘Jesus.’ I still invoke him as an entity to reckon with.
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I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
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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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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