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 SMITHIn 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?
More Patti Smith Quotes
-
-
Writing is not some quiet, closet act.
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
I’m not really a nostalgic person.
PATTI SMITH -
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 -
I’ve always considered myself a writer.
PATTI SMITH -
I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
PATTI SMITH -
All I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
PATTI SMITH -
A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.
PATTI SMITH -
Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
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 -
You can’t work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
PATTI SMITH -
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
PATTI SMITH -
Well, I’m not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I’m performing, that’s what I’m doing. If I’m not, I don’t long for it. I don’t need the approval of an audience, or applause.
PATTI SMITH -
I felt alien my whole life but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
PATTI SMITH -
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