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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.

Patti Smith

I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
PATTI SMITH

Alien Gender People
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
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
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
PATTI SMITH

Closets Quiet Writing
You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH

Good Scales Trust Zipper
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.
PATTI SMITH

Give Horoscope Mother Year
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 SMITH

Communicate Embrace Need People
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.
PATTI SMITH

Eye Light Recognition Sleep
I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH

Always Consider Myself Writer
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
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 SMITH

Limelight Long Need People Perform
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
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
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
PATTI SMITH

Path Questions Twisted Unanswered
All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITH

Children Want Wonderful
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.
PATTI SMITH

Around Dawn Roaming World

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 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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Popular Authors

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