I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
PATTI SMITHShould I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
More Patti Smith Quotes
-
-
Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
PATTI SMITH -
All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITH -
One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
PATTI SMITH -
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.
PATTI SMITH -
I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
PATTI SMITH -
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
PATTI SMITH -
The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
PATTI SMITH -
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
PATTI SMITH -
Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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 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 -
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 -
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.
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
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 -
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.
PATTI SMITH -
I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.
PATTI SMITH -
Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
PATTI SMITH -
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.
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
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 -
Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
PATTI SMITH -
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 SMITH -
You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH