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 SMITHThe film [Dream of Life] doesn’t hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.
More Patti Smith Quotes
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I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
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Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.
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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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You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
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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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I’m okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I’ll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I’m in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.
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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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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.
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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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Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
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Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)
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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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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 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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A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH