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
As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the '70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.
Interpretation
What this quote means
An artist's responsibility extends beyond their work to how they influence the public as a figure.
Patti Smith reflects on the evolution of her understanding of responsibility as an artist. Initially, she believed that producing quality art was sufficient, but over time she recognized that being a public figure entails additional responsibilities, particularly in how one affects society and engages with their audience.
Themes
ArtistResponsibilityPublic FigureInfluenceArt
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech at an art exhibition discussing the role of artists in society.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
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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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