Quote

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

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
Start
Artist
Order
Poets
Place
Destroy
Everything
Core
Sometimes
Artists
Made
Poet
Something
Started

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Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.
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Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?
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My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.
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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 was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.
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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.
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Committing great work does not necessarily feed you.
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When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.
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Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
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Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.
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By the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, I'm done. I'm never going to be a missionary, because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood.
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Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient.
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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.
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I think its very important to not be afraid to experience joy in the middle of sorrow.
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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.
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Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
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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 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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One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal.
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I walk alone, assaulted it seems, by tears from heaven.
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