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"  I look at each experience talking to someone as a whole new world. We were a lower-middle-class family, and every time we bemoaned our fate, my mother would say, &amp;quot;I wept because I&amp;#039;ve no shoes, and then I saw a man who had no feet.&amp;quot; That was my mother&amp;#039;s mantra, and it&amp;#039;s a good one. My father was a beautiful man. When I was a kid, his whole preoccupation was the search for the meaning of life. If a fireman came to the door, he&amp;#039;d invite him in and immediately engage him in some kind of philosophical discussion. Why are we here? Who put us here? What is our purpose? So I had a very down-to-earth, compassionate mother and a head-in-the-clouds, searching father. It was like being raised by the earth and the sky. A lot of people think I&amp;#039;m going to be like a punk rocker and just tell them to go fuck themselves. I&amp;#039;m not like that at all. When I was young, I could be very confrontational. But that was maybe forty years ago. So I&amp;#039;ve already done that. When you&amp;#039;re going up a hill on an Icelandic pony and you&amp;#039;re about to jump over a little stream, you must completely believe in the horse and fate. Because if you show fear, you&amp;#039;ll spook the horse and the horse may stumble. It&amp;#039;s not being reckless. It&amp;#039;s being unfettered by doubt. That&amp;#039;s my definition of trust. I like my mind, and I feared harming it. I saw some of the best minds of my generation, and some a little older than me, destroy themselves in front of my eyes. That&amp;#039;s what kept me from the drugs and other excesses in the seventies. I said no not because I lacked courage; it&amp;#039;s because I was self-protective. Fear can be useful. I had a taste of fame in the late seventies through rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll. It started in Europe, not so much in America. In Florence, we had eighty thousand people come to see us in a soccer arena with no opening band. I had girls chasing me up the street, trying to cut my hair, and there were people offering themselves to me. It was kind of fun. Interesting. But it didn&amp;#039;t contribute to any evolution. Not to my work or to my evolution as a human being, and I became very conscious of that very quickly. Very quickly. If you walk the streets alone and you look afraid \u2026 you&amp;#039;ll draw people to you. Those are the people who get mugged or robbed. Nothing ever happened to me. I was open, but I wasn&amp;#039;t afraid. Milk cost, say, eight cents. Chocolate milk cost ten cents. Robert [Mapplethorpe, the artist and Smith&amp;#039;s longtime companion] loved chocolate milk. We didn&amp;#039;t have the extra two cents to buy him the chocolate milk, or if we did it would mean I couldn&amp;#039;t get my coffee. So it was always a trade-off. We got to a point where it was either a sharpener and three pencils or a grilled-cheese sandwich we could split. Finally, I would just lift the pencils so we could eat. Friendsisn&amp;#039;t even a good enough word. I wrote Just Kids for Robert. I said to him, &amp;quot;Is there anything I can do?&amp;quot; We both knew he was dying. He gave me some tasks he wanted me to do, and then he said, &amp;quot;Will you write our story?&amp;quot; And I shuddered, you know, and said, &amp;quot;Do you really want me to?&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; And I said, &amp;quot;Well, then I will write it.&amp;quot; He knew I would. And he died the next day. It was quite a task, and sometimes, truthfully, I didn&amp;#039;t feel up to it and I would shelve it. It took me twenty years to find the courage, the voice, and the energy.  I always doubted\u2014Am I really an artist? Robert had no doubt. He had no doubt that he was an artist, and he wanted me also to have no doubt. Sometimes curiosity is akin to excitement. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s just having an investigative mind. All the people that I&amp;#039;ve lost\u2014and I&amp;#039;ve lost a lot\u2014I keep them with me. And it makes life that much happier. About six or seven years ago, I saw the perfect shirt for Fred, my late husband. I started paying for it before I even realized what I was doing. And then I bought it anyway. I just keep them all with me because life doesn&amp;#039;t have to be so lonely. You know, if you shut everybody out just because they die, then what&amp;#039;s it all for? I&amp;#039;m sort of on Life Four. Until I was twenty, there was my life with my family. In the seventies, it was my life with Robert but also Sam Shepard and the band. It was all the things that happened in New York. The next decade and a half was with my husband. And between &amp;#039;94 to 2004, I was raising my children, still going through whatever, grieving. And now my children are grown. In the last ten years, I&amp;#039;m a bum. I&amp;#039;m a happy tramp, just going where I like, on my own. I have no companion, sort of free. The difference is I usually have money in my pocket to eat. I don&amp;#039;t have to go scarfing around for sixty-five cents for a sandwich.  Maybe curiosity killed the cat, but the lack of curiosity will kill us. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a38545/patti-smith-what-ive-learned/>