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

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects the artist's integrity over conformity, emphasizing authentic creation over commercial pressure.

Patti Smith expresses her commitment to authenticity in her music career, acknowledging her imperfections yet asserting that she never compromised her artistic vision to satisfy the demands of the music industry. This highlights the struggle between maintaining one's individuality and the pressures of commercial success.

Themes

AuthenticityArtIntegrityMusicIndividuality

In practice

Example use cases

During a speech on artistic integrity at a music festival.

More from Patti Smith

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
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 heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
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.
Patti SmithRead
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.
Patti SmithRead
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
Patti SmithRead
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.
Patti SmithRead

Similar quotes

I prefer to unwind by DJing. I learned that from Mike D from the Beastie Boys. After a show, he would DJ. Once I saw that, I wanted to do that. And now DJing is like my lifeline. I love the power it represents.
QuestloveRead
If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
Patrick NessRead
I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive.
Lillian GishRead
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
Frank GehryRead
To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.
Frei OttoRead
That which is creative must create itself.
John KeatsRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.