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.
PATTI SMITHLife isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn’t know who to work with.
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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.
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
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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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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.
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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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Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
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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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I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.
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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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To be an artist – actually, to be a human being in these times – it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.
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I 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.
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I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
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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