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 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?
More Patti Smith Quotes
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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.
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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 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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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 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.
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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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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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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.
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I’ve always considered myself a writer.
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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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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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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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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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I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
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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.
PATTI SMITH