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 SMITHI’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
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I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITH -
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.
PATTI SMITH -
Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH -
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
PATTI SMITH -
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
PATTI SMITH -
Everybody’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 SMITH -
I 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 SMITH -
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.
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Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.
PATTI SMITH -
What 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 SMITH -
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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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITH -
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







