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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.

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
Right
Parents
Always
Second
Sickly
World
Serious
Asthma
Parent
Struggled
Sort
Sibling
War
Fourth
Three
Medical
Kids
Bills

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I can't bear working with a click track, we're not click track people. But for Mercy Is ... we all got in one mind because the song is delicate it's not a song that showcases a vocal or some virtuoso.
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My sunglasses are like my guitar.
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I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.
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For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
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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'm a total failure at housewifery. I always have been, 'cause I daydream too much. If I start doing the dishes at one in the afternoon, I'll still be there at six in the evening.
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I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.
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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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When I perform, I always opt for communication with God, and in pursuit of communicating with God, you can enter some very dangerous territory. I also have come to realize that total communication with God is physical death.
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Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.
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I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female I'm an artist.
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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.
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I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.
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In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.
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I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made.
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I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.
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New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.
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I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.
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That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.
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When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.
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