I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
Patti SmithRead
In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
Interpretation
Embrace creativity and dreams while maintaining balance in reality.
Patti Smith's quote emphasizes the importance of exploring the realms of art and imagination freely, without reservations, while also advocating for a grounded approach in life that requires careful navigation and balance. It suggests that artistic expression thrives on abandon, but our everyday actions should be measured and thoughtful to achieve harmony.
In practice
During a speech at an art exhibit, one could say, 'As Patti Smith puts it, in art we find freedom, but in life, we must tread carefully.'
I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heavenβs kaleidoscope.
For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.
The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.
From the beginning I thought about working with the body in movement, the space between the body and clothes. I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh
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