Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.
Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like.
In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
I don't know why, the very first word on my very first record is 'Jesus. ' I still invoke him as an entity to reckon with.
I'd never had people drive me around, and then all of a sudden, if a car didn't come, I'd say, "Where's my car?"
I wasn't thinking so much of music. I wasnt thinking so much of perfection or stardom or any of that stuff.
I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age. . . if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive. . . the time to flower is now.
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.
Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)
Sometimes you write passages that don't need to be rewritten. Performance is that for me. Improvisation, things that happen in the moment, are sometimes wonderful, or wonderful as a moment to be shared between performer and people, but that's it. There might be a strong bond between you and the people, a transformative night, but as a live record it might not translate.
I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late '50s and early '60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.
Those were the things on my mind [stay healthy, take care of my kids and reestablish a relationship with the people], not career, money, drugs, sex, alcohol or fun. Not that there's anything wrong with any of those things, but they aren't in the film [Dream of Life], because that wasn't my life at the time.
Steven's [Sebring] presence was not threatening; he told me that if I never wanted the footage to be seen by anyone, he would give it to me. So I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and what I gained was his supportive energy and the supportive energy of his wife, who was sometimes the one schlepping the equipment or doing the sound.
Trust is everything between two artists, or between subject and artist. You have to have trust or nothing good will come out of it.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.