Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
PATTI SMITHNever let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
PATTI SMITHI’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 SMITHWill you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
PATTI SMITHI’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITHI’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.
PATTI SMITHFor 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 SMITHIn 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 SMITHI’m not really a nostalgic person.
PATTI SMITHI’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
PATTI SMITHTrust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
PATTI SMITHPeople 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 SMITHSo 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 SMITHI’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 SMITHI 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 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.
PATTI SMITHI 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