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
If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a reflection on personal shortcomings in creative expression.
Patti Smith reflects on her life's journey, acknowledging a sense of regret for not achieving her fullest potential as a writer and singer. This introspection reveals the common human desire to strive for excellence and the weight of self-criticism that can come with artistic pursuits.
In practice
Using this quote during a writing workshop to inspire participants to reflect on their creative journey.
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.
Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin.
Harry Potter has kindly joined us for my rebirthing party. One might go so far as to call him my guest of honor.
The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
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