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 SMITHTrust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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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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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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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
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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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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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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 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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Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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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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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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I’ve lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.
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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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I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
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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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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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I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH