"Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like."
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Quote collection
Patti Smith quotes (page 10 of 23)
456 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969."
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"The film [Dream of Life] doesn't hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me."
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"Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man."
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"As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don't do that with men - nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, "We want your work to be in a show about women artists," and I'm like, why? For Christ's sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?"
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"I want to be around a really long time. I want to be a thorn in the side of everything as long as possible."
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"In 1974, when I started working with the material that became Horses, a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X."
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"Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up."
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"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."
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"Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one."
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"New York is the thing that seduced me. New York is the thing that formed me. New York is the thing that deformed me. New York is the thing that perverted me. New York is the thing that converted me. And New York is the thing that I love too."
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"I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation."
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"My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled."
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"I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings."
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"I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn't even give me the time of day."
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"Look at Obama - he is now [2015] trying to help us environmentally but he should have done it eight years ago. He's trying to salvage his legacy and trying to do something good but we needed for him to show leadership from day one."
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"My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games."
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"When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist."
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"I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn't mean that we didn't have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor."
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"So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger."
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