I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that an artist strives to create and represent beauty in a way that rivals divine creation.
Patti Smith's quote emphasizes the notion that artists engage in a profound and often spiritual competition with the divine, as they seek to channel their creativity to produce works that echo the beauty and complexity of the natural world. By claiming artistic expression as a form of rivalry with God, Smith highlights the sacredness and significance of art, elevating the artist's role in society to one of a creator who mirrors divine inspiration.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at an art conference may use this quote to inspire discussion about the role of creativity in society.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes βMy 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.
Similar quotes
Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about - something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.
When I'm making video games today, I want people to be entertained. I am always thinking, How are people going to enjoy playing the games we are making today? And as long as I can enjoy something other people can enjoy it, too.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor.
I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.
The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.