Patti Smith Quotes
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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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Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.
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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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As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister.
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Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?
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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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Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.
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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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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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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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Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.
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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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The cult of celebrity in the '60s and '70s was really more reserved for movie stars or high socialites. Paparazzi didn't care about Janis Joplin.
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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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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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To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
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Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
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People have the power to redeem the work of fools.
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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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The only thing I daydreamed about was being an opera singer. But I was so skinny and so pathetic that that sort of wasn't going to happen.
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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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People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.
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I'm not part of any movement; I don't like being fettered.