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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
Rock
Rocks
Need
Needs

More quotes by Patti Smith

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New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock 'n' roll belongs to the people.
Patti Smith
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I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.
Patti Smith
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I'm okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I'll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I'm in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.
Patti Smith
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We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. oh, take their picture, said the woman to her bemused husband, I think they're artists. Oh, go on, he shrugged. They're just kids.
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 think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true.
Patti Smith
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We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.
Patti Smith
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What I wanted to do in rock'n'roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
Patti Smith
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Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.
Patti Smith
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I wanted to remember the original energy strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.
Patti Smith
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Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.
Patti Smith
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We never had any children, he said ruefully. Our work was our children.
Patti Smith
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Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?
Patti Smith
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Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.'
Patti Smith
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To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
Patti Smith
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My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.
Patti Smith
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I walk alone, assaulted it seems, by tears from heaven.
Patti Smith
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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.
Patti Smith
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If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.
Patti Smith
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I have abandoned so many projects but in the '80s when I left public life to be married and have real children - I love my children and I would never sacrifice them for anything - I had to find a way to simultaneously be a mother and wife and fulfill my duties and still be true to myself as a writer.
Patti Smith