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 had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the beauty of diverse musical influences across genres in shaping one's identity.
Patti Smith emphasizes her early appreciation for a wide range of musical styles, highlighting that both classical and rock music resonated with her at a young age. This suggests that true artistry transcends genres and that one can find meaning and inspiration in varied forms of expression, regardless of their cultural or stylistic background.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of varied musical education in schools.
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 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.
Regardless of theology or however you see life or relate to worshiping God, as an artist, my job is to tell the truth and then try to connect with these characters and people as honestly and deeply as possible.
On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’
I try to make clothes the way Lou Reed does music, with minimal chord changes. It's about giving everything I make a worn, softened feel. It's about an elegance being tinged with the barbaric, the luxury of not caring.
Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
I did roles that I hated, and there were roles that were detrimental to my acting ability. There were roles that I was always doing that were always the comic relief... it was destroying my soul.
The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'
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