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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

• 

  Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?

  PATTI SMITH
  AssumeBoyfriendHopePretend
• 

  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
  BoyfriendGirlGrowiKidTomboy
• 

  You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

  PATTI SMITH
  GoodScalesTrustZipper
• 

  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
  AnimateArtPeriodTalkZoo
• 

  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
  FrustrationRockStar
• 

  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.

  PATTI SMITH
  PoliticalRockYesterday
• 

  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
  CommunicateEmbraceNeedPeople
• 

  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.

  PATTI SMITH
  LiveMagicNaivePeopleThink
• 

  One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.

  PATTI SMITH
  DayOneTogetherWork
• 

  I’m not really a nostalgic person.

  PATTI SMITH
  NostalgicPersonReally
• 

  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
  GiveHoroscopeMotherYear
• 

  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
• 

  Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

  PATTI SMITH
  ClosetsQuietWriting
• 

  A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.

  PATTI SMITH
  ArtistHandZipper
• 

  Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

  PATTI SMITH
  ColorSoulVowel
• 

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

  PATTI SMITH
  ChildrenLipstickNeedRed