Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
PATTI SMITHI’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.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
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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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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
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Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
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I’m okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I’ll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I’m in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.
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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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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.
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So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.
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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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I’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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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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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH