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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.

Patti Smith

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
PATTI SMITH

Mortals Poetry Remember
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
A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH

Artist Hand Zipper
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
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

Art Period Point Talk Zoos
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 SMITH

Boyfriend Girl Growi Kid Tomboy
I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH

Always Consider Myself Writer
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
PATTI SMITH

Adventure Design Fate
The film [Dream of Life] doesn’t hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.
PATTI SMITH

Darkness Dream Sorrow
Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
PATTI SMITH

Brother Distant Future Heart
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
People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone’s vision, because in the end, that’s what you got: your clay in someone else’s hands.
PATTI SMITH

Hand People Vision
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
One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.
PATTI SMITH

Day One Together Work
I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITH

Laureate Long Poet
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
PATTI SMITH

Closets Quiet Writing

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’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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Popular Authors

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