"I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar."
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Quote collection
Patti Smith quotes (page 11 of 23)
456 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"All I've ever wanted to do was create freedom."
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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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"Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed."
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"I learned a lot from Arthur Rimbaud. People talk about how he wanted to be a seer and do that through the derangement of the senses. What they forget was that he also advocated, sternly and austerely, that one must be able to go through all that - and then articulate it."
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"Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through."
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"I think it's good for people to see the positive beauty that can flower from the deepest grieving."
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"I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it."
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"One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens."
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"Writing is not some quiet, closet act."
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"I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it."
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"I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately."
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"Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too."
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"What is the impulse that drove to direct? To me, it seems so immense. Just having a rock 'n' roll band, or to go from the solitude of writing and to having to collaborate, is almost schizophrenic."
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"I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry."
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"When I started making music, we'd lost a lot of our great people. Rock was moving in a direction I didn't like. Rock was my generation's revolutionary, sexual, poetic, and political voice, but it had become corporatized. It was going into stadiums. It was so far removed from its basic roots."
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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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"We tried not to age, but time had its rage."
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"I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me."
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