Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
PATTI SMITHPeople 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.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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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 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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Everybody’s got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock’n’roll, political activismand it’s got to be done over and over again. It’s like eating: you can’t say,’Oh, I ate yesterday’.You have to eat again.
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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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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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One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
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I’m not really a nostalgic person.
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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 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.
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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
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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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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
PATTI SMITH