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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

• 

  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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• 

  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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• 

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

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• 

  Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.

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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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• 

  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 knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.

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• 

  Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.

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• 

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

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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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• 

  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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• 

  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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• 

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

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• 

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

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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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• 

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

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