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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
Human
Humans
Matter
Pursue
Matters
Actually
Times
Difficult
Artist

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I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.
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I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late '50s and early '60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.
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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.
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If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities.
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I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are.
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What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.
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I always wear the same thing onstage.
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I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love.
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First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor.
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Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.
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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.
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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.
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Your soul was like a network of spittle.
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I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.
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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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I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.
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I think guys are more emotional. Men are supposed to be the strong ones, they have pressure on them to be strong, but when it comes to sex men are much more emotional than women.
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Blessedness is within us all.
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I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.
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Ultimately, I want to make everyone horny.
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