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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Patti Smith

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More Patti Smith Quotes

• 

  Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.

  PATTI SMITH
  HorizontalLinesNeatWorld
• 

  I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

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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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• 

  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.

  PATTI SMITH
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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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  GoodScalesTrustZipper
• 

  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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• 

  Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

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• 

  Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

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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 refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

  PATTI SMITH
  BelieveHandMind
• 

  I’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.

  PATTI SMITH
  ImaginationPeopleWriting
• 

  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.

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• 

  I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.

  PATTI SMITH
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• 

  All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.

  PATTI SMITH
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• 

  Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.

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• 

  I 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
  DesireEmeraldLoss