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 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 SMITHA good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
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.
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 SMITHRemember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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 SMITHI’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
PATTI SMITHEverybody’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.
PATTI SMITHI 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 SMITHI knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITHI understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
PATTI SMITHPeople 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 SMITHI had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
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’ve always considered myself a writer.
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 SMITH