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

Patti Smith

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

Desire Emerald Loss
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.
PATTI SMITH

Actual Artist Human Matters
The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
PATTI SMITH

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

Color Soul Vowel
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

Animate Art Period Talk Zoo
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.
PATTI SMITH

Couple Father Loss
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

Political Rock Yesterday
Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
PATTI SMITH

Horizontal Lines Neat World
I started resenting how much art robs from life. I’d go to a party and I couldn’t enjoy myself, even sexually. All I could think was how I was going to reinvent the experience into a piece of art.
PATTI SMITH

Art Piece Sexually Thinking
A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH

Artist Hand Zipper
Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
PATTI SMITH

Brother Distant Future Heart
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.
PATTI SMITH

Drinking Idea Reading
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
PATTI SMITH

Adventure Design Fate
With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn’t know who to work with.
PATTI SMITH

Collaborator Lost Photograph
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
PATTI SMITH

Artist Hungered Proof Stuff
I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
PATTI SMITH

Loneliness Space Understood

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

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

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More Patti Smith Quotes