Patti Smith Quotes
- All Quotes
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I have a lot of energy, and I like to work.
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My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.
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I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town.
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Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.
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An artist wears his work in place of wounds.
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When I was a child, I was certain that I could remember what it was like to live on Venus; I could remember what it was like to live in the American Plains. I could remember. And it's ancient memory. We all have it. It's just that some of us access it more than others.
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I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
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I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
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Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music.
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In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
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A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.
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A day doesn't go by where I don't create something.
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Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.
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In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
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I like revisiting my early work, and people like to hear it. I don't make people suffer through any experimentation or new material. When I go see an artist, I want to hear the songs that drew me to them, so I do the same.
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I remember when the Bic pen was controversial. They came from France. They were cheap, and when one was out of ink, you threw it away; you didn't dip it into more ink.
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I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story.
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My parents were very humanistic, but where we lived was not the cultural center of the world. Hardly. So I came to New York for two reasons: to find my own kin and also to get a job. And that's what I came to New York for in '67.
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My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.
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I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.
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What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
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When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.
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My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.
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As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.