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 SMITHIn 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?
More Patti Smith Quotes
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I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
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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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The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
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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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The film [Dream of Life] doesn’t hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.
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One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
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Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
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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 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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Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
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I’ve lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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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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Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
PATTI SMITH