I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
I love playing the Fillmore. I love the walk from the hotel and climbing up those old, iron stairs that lead to the stage. I imagine Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and all those other great bands climbing those same stairs.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the deep appreciation and connection an artist feels for a significant venue, honoring the legends who performed there before.
Patti Smith expresses her love for performing at the Fillmore, a historic music venue, by sharing her nostalgic experience of walking from the hotel and ascending the same stairs as legendary musicians like Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix. This quote captures the reverence and inspiration that an artist feels when in the presence of a place steeped in musical history, linking her own journey to that of the icons who came before her.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech at a music awards ceremony, one could say, 'Like Patti Smith love playing the Fillmore, I too feel a special connection to this stage where legends once stood.'
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.
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.
Similar quotes
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
But there's no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We're not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it's hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.
Copy is not written. If anyone tells you ‘you write copy’, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in.