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
Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that aspiring artists have an inherent responsibility to create and contribute to the world.
Patti Smith expresses the idea that those who are drawn to art not only have a passion for it but also feel a deeper obligation to share their vision and creativity. This sense of duty drives artists to engage with their communities, provoke thought, and inspire change through their work, reinforcing the notion that art is not just a personal endeavor but a communal contribution.
Themes
ArtistDutyAspirationResponsibilityCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about creativity at an arts festival.
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.
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
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