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If you don't have what you need, just rock with what you've got!

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
Needs
Rock
Rocks
Need

More quotes by Patti Smith

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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
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My sunglasses are like my guitar.
Patti Smith
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Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
Patti Smith
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When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.
Patti Smith
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I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.
Patti Smith
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Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.
Patti Smith
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I didn't want any middle-of-the-road creep. I always wanted the toughest guy in school, the guy from south Philly who wore tight black pants. Y'know, the guy who carried the umbrella and wore white shirts with real thin black ties. I was really nuts over this guy named Butchie Magic 'cause he let me carry his switchblade.
Patti Smith
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I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.
Patti Smith
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I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.
Patti Smith
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[Steven Sebring] presence was also nice for my children, who, having just lost their father, quite naturally craved warm male attention. They gravitated to him right away.
Patti Smith
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Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar.
Patti Smith
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All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing.
Patti Smith
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A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.
Patti Smith
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I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.
Patti Smith
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Punk rock is just another word for freedom.
Patti Smith
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I like my time on earth. And no matter what kind of cards I've been dealt, I'm happy to be there.
Patti Smith
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As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.
Patti Smith
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Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it.
Patti Smith
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If your label won't let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave!
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