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When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
Patti Smith
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Patti Smith
Age: 77
Born: 1946
Born: December 30
Composer
Drawer
Guitarist
Human Rights Activist
Musician
Photographer
Poet
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Visual Artist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Patricia Lee Smith
People
Younger
Wake
Rock
Rocks
Poetry
Duty
Felt
Asleep
Thought
Roll
More quotes by Patti Smith
I wanted to remember the original energy strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.
Patti Smith
Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
Patti Smith
I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are.
Patti Smith
New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock 'n' roll belongs to the people.
Patti Smith
Sometimes you have to abandon your own children for other children.
Patti Smith
If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.
Patti Smith
My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
Patti Smith
To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.
Patti Smith
I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.
Patti Smith
I loved books I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
Patti Smith
I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.
Patti Smith
My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We're all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it.
Patti Smith
I don't think the average American understands what patriotism truthfully is. That's why when I attack our country or attack the government, it's sometimes looked at as unpatriotic. It's not.
Patti Smith
I really don't want somebody writing something positive about me if they don't believe in it. I'd rather somebody write something real mean. I like reading bad stuff, it gets me excited. In fact, the only reviews I keep are the bad ones 'cause I think they're the cool ones.
Patti Smith
I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.
Patti Smith
I have seen a lifetime of transgender people and it was hard enough being gay in the '50s and early '60s. One couldn't imagine the cruelty that trans people had to face back then.
Patti Smith
I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.
Patti Smith
What will happen to us? I asked. There will always be us, he answered.
Patti Smith
I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.
Patti Smith
I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.
Patti Smith
