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Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

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
Made
Rocks
Always
Poet
People
Called
Art
Persons
Dabbled
Person
Wary
Firsts
Exactly
First
Rock

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Words are just rules and regulations 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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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.
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Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.
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I'm very comfortable with being a female now but when I was a little kid I only wanted to be a boy. I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't feel like a man inside... being a boy was just cooler.
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Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.
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The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.
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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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Ultimately, we are not seeking others to bow to, but to reinforce our individual natures, to help us suffer our own choices, to guide us on our own particular journeys.
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When you do controversial work, you're going to upset a certain amount of people.
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Ultimately, I want to make everyone horny.
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John Coltrane, he talks to god. He starts playing his solo, he might play for 14 minutes. For 14 minutes, it seems like he's talking to god, but he always takes a hold of the melody.
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When I was working on the lyrics, I thought of all the lullabies we learn as children: Away in the Manger, William Blake's lullabies. I realized that the key to lullabies is simplicity.
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I wasn't thinking so much of music. I wasnt thinking so much of perfection or stardom or any of that stuff.
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The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.
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Committing great work does not necessarily feed you.
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My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.
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I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin', I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension.
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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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