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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

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 SMITH

Hand People Vision
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
My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn’t come anymore, but I had his support.
PATTI SMITH

Couple Father Loss
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
PATTI SMITH

Path Questions Twisted Unanswered
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
PATTI SMITH

Adventure Design Fate
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
You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH

Good Scales Trust Zipper
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

First Jesus Record
All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITH

Children Want Wonderful
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.
PATTI SMITH

Fire Love Romantic
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.
PATTI SMITH

Eye Light Recognition Sleep
The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
PATTI SMITH

Book Inspired Two
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
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
I’m not really a nostalgic person.
PATTI SMITH

Nostalgic Person Really
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

Alcohol Causes Drug

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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