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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.

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

Boyfriend Girl Growi Kid Tomboy
I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH

Always Consider Myself Writer
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

Art Piece Sexually Thinking
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

Art Period Point Talk Zoos
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

Eye Light Recognition Sleep
I’m not really a nostalgic person.
PATTI SMITH

Nostalgic Person Really
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

Collaborator Lost Photograph
I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITH

Laureate Long Poet
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

Communicate Embrace Need People
Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
PATTI SMITH

Mortals Poetry Remember
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 SMITH

Alien Gender People
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

Animate Art Period Talk Zoo
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
PATTI SMITH

Artist Ethic Morale Work
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.
PATTI SMITH

Give Horoscope Mother Year
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.
PATTI SMITH

First Jesus Record
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

Actual Artist Human Matters

Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.

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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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