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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

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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
Actually
Times
Difficult
Artist
Human
Humans
Matter
Pursue
Matters

More quotes by Patti Smith

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I love being alive. I like being a human being.
Patti Smith
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I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story.
Patti Smith
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Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love.
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling between my legs and I had no idea what it was. I didn't know girls masturbated. I never touched myself or anything.
Patti Smith
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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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Sometimes I get lost in watching a film. The sorrow, or the frustration, is when it doesn't happen for a long time.
Patti Smith
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I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy.
Patti Smith
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Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.
Patti Smith
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For me, personally, I think drugs are sacred and should be used for work. That's what I believe in. Drugs have a real shamanistic value. I can handle drugs. I've never had a problem.
Patti Smith
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I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.
Patti Smith
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In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot.
Patti Smith
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We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer.
Patti Smith
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Spare the child and spoil the rod, I am not sellin' myself to god.
Patti Smith
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I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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I don't think people should do biopics of living people. I'm totally opposed to that.
Patti Smith