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Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.

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

Political Rock Yesterday
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
PATTI SMITH

Give Horoscope Mother Year
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

Art Period Point Talk Zoos
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 SMITH

Drinking Idea Reading
I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.
PATTI SMITH

Loneliness Space Understood
I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITH

Laureate Long Poet
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.
PATTI SMITH

Frustration Rock Star
I’ve always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
PATTI SMITH

Imagination People Writing
I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.
PATTI SMITH

Communicate Embrace Need People
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.
PATTI SMITH

Live Magic Naive People Think
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

Artist Ethic Morale Work
You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH

Good Scales Trust Zipper
I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH

Always Consider Myself Writer
A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH

Artist Hand Zipper
Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
PATTI SMITH

Mortals Poetry Remember
With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn’t know who to work with.
PATTI SMITH

Collaborator Lost Photograph

Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.

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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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