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
I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act._x000D_ I consider it a real physical act._x000D_ When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy._x000D_ I move like a monkey._x000D_ I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing is an intense and physical act for the author, rather than a silent, isolated task.
Patti Smith emphasizes the vigorous and passionate nature of writing, suggesting that it is far more than a mere cerebral exercise or a solitary activity. She underscores the emotional and physical intensity involved in the creative process, portraying writing as a wild, almost uncontrollable act that embodies her very being.
Themes
WritingCreativityArtExpressionPassion
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop on creative writing, a participant quotes Patti Smith to illustrate the physicality of the writing process.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes →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
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Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.
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