“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

Patti Smith

Patti Smith - “But secretly I knew I had been...” 1

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“I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

Patti Smith
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“I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art...I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort. I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something...different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.”

Robert Jackson Bennett
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“They weren't coming back and I could never re-create what we had, but I could move forward.”

Katie McGarry
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“...I knew he had something that so many of my other students were lacking... desire. Not just the desire to create because for an artist that desire arises with no conscious effort- like lust.”

Darian North
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“And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies. ”

Sue Miller
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