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 SMITHWill you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
More Patti Smith Quotes
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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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Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.
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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.
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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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Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
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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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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.
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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
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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.
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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.
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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’ve lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.
PATTI SMITH