The voices / 86 fragments

Patti Smith

Dates not recorded

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Archive entries

01Undated

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

Patti Smith / quote

02Undated

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

Patti Smith / quote

03Undated

...the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

Patti Smith / quote

04Undated

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

Patti Smith / quote

05Undated

He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.

Patti Smith / quote

06Undated

Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!

Patti Smith / quote

07Undated

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.

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08Undated

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

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09Undated

A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

Patti Smith / quote

10Undated

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

Patti Smith / quote

11Undated

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the

Patti Smith / quote

12Undated

Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.

Patti Smith / quote

13Undated

We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

Patti Smith / quote

14Undated

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

Patti Smith / quote

15Undated

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.

Patti Smith / quote

16Undated

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

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17Undated

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

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18Undated

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

Patti Smith / quote

19Undated

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

Patti Smith / quote

20Undated

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

Patti Smith / quote

21Undated

I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.

Patti Smith / quote

22Undated

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

Patti Smith / quote

23Undated

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

Patti Smith / quote

24Undated

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

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