I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
PATTI SMITHI was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
PATTI SMITHWill you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
PATTI SMITHI’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.
PATTI SMITHWhat a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
PATTI SMITHAll I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITHTrust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
PATTI SMITHI had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
PATTI SMITHI 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.
PATTI SMITHThe two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
PATTI SMITHI understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
PATTI SMITHOne day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
PATTI SMITHI felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
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?
PATTI SMITHI 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 SMITHA good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITHSo 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