quotes from classic

When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them.

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I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

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I've always believed in having a sense of balance and stealth.

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My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers.

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What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

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People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone's vision, because in the end, that's what you got: your clay in someone else's hands.

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I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

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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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People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

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My style says, 'Look at me, don't look at me.'

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Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.

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Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man.

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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.

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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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I'm not a very analytical person.

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An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

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You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie.

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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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I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy.

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When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them. I just haven't gotten around to it for several reasons.

more quotes from Patti Smith