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 no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The desire to be recognized as an artist often exists even without external validation or evidence of talent.
In this quote, Patti Smith expresses the internal struggle of aspiring artists who feel a deep yearning to create and be acknowledged as artists, despite lacking the outward proof of their abilities. This highlights a common theme in the artistic journey, where passion and ambition can exist in tandem with self-doubt and uncertainty regarding one's talents.
Themes
ArtistCreativityPassionSelf-DoubtAspiration
In practice
Example use cases
Sharing with a friend who dreams of becoming an artist but feels unsure of their talents.
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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