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.
PATTI SMITHI understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
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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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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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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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.
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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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I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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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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I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
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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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Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)
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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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I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.
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I was never a singer, I can’t play any instruments, I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn’t have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern.
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A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH