Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
PATTI SMITHLife is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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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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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 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.
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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 had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
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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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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
PATTI SMITH -
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
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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.
PATTI SMITH -
Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
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 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