Patti Smith Quotes
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My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories.
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When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.
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As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the '70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.
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Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.
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No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
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It's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.
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I never thought I was gonna live to 30.
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The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.
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I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
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Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?
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Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
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I had a penchant myself for doing several things at once. I wanted to draw, write, speak.
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People have the power to redeem the work of fools.
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I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.
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If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people.
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We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
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I'm not part of any movement; I don't like being fettered.
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When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them. I just haven't gotten around to it for several reasons.
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Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.
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People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.
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I voted for Obama. I was very happy when he won. But Obama hasn't really been able to effectively do anything that has made me... He hasn't helped the environment. He didn't close Guantanamo Bay. He went deeper into Afghanistan.
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Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.
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I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician.
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My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers.