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 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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My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn’t come anymore, but I had his support.
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I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
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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’m not really a nostalgic person.
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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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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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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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Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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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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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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The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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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.
PATTI SMITH