Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
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
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I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.
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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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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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Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.
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Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?
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I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.
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I’m not really a nostalgic person.
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Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.
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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 always had a desire to write something and capture people’s imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
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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.
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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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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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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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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)
PATTI SMITH







