Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag.”

— Patti Smith

52. “Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake.”

— Patti Smith

53. “We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.”

— Patti Smith

54. “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”

— Patti Smith

55. “I’ve lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.”

— Patti Smith

56. “In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.”

— Patti Smith

57. “It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.”

— Patti Smith

58. “Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.”

— Patti Smith

59. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

— Patti Smith

60. “Sometimes you’re doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It’s not like you get to a point where you’re all right for the rest of your life.”

— Patti Smith

61. “Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”

— Patti Smith

62. “This is what I know – Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”

— Patti Smith

63. “I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

— Patti Smith

64. “I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.”

— Patti Smith

65. “Fate is like a secret friend that helps push you on into life.”

— Patti Smith

66. “I always wrote like rock ‘n’ roll. And I always listen to rock ‘n’ roll as poetry.”

— Patti Smith

67. “We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”

— Patti Smith

68. “I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.”

— Patti Smith

69. “I love to photograph the tools of one’s trade: Duncan Grant’s paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.”

— Patti Smith

70. “In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”

— Patti Smith

71. “Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody – Paris for me was a Mecca.”

— Patti Smith

72. “The hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new.”

— Patti Smith

73. “You’re not a rock ‘n’ roll person four hours a day or even when you’re on stage. It’s become the rhythm of your whole life.”

— Patti Smith

74. “Some things melt before they become memories.”

— Patti Smith

75. “When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.”

— Patti Smith

76. “But then everything eventually changes. It’s the way of the world. Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.”

— Patti Smith

77. “Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.”

— Patti Smith

78. “Good news doesn’t necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one’s fellow man.”

— Patti Smith

79. “Blessedness is within us all.”

— Patti Smith

80. “For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.”

— Patti Smith

81. “I just know that young people suffer, and I also know music is one of the things that help you get through – music and friends.”

— Patti Smith

82. “One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That’s my goal.”

— Patti Smith

83. “I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one’s finest work.”

— Patti Smith

84. “I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings.”

— Patti Smith

85. “I’m not really a musician. I’m a performer and I love rock ‘n’ roll.”

— Patti Smith

86. “As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister.”

— Patti Smith

87. “I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.”

— Patti Smith

88. “I use drugs to work. I never use them to escape or for pleasure. When you turn to drugs, all you’re doing is turning inside, anyway. I only use drugs for construction. It’s like one of my architectural tools.”

— Patti Smith

89. “Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.”

— Patti Smith

90. “I believe we all have a unique journey, whether its a journey of pure energy, if there’s any intelligence within the journey. But I think each of us have our own way of dissipating or entering a new field.”

— Patti Smith

91. “Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.”

— Patti Smith

92. “Most women writers don’t interest me because they’re hung up with being a woman, they’re hung up with being Jewish, they’re hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.”

— Patti Smith

93. “The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.”

— Patti Smith

94. “In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos – the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?”

— Patti Smith

95. “I don’t consider writing a quiet, closet act. I consider it a real physical act. When I’m home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy. I move like a monkey. I’ve wet myself, I’ve come in my pants writing.”

— Patti Smith

96. “I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.”

— Patti Smith

97. “So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”

— Patti Smith

98. “Laughter. An essential ingredient for survival. And we laughed a lot.”

— Patti Smith

99. “My father’s mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother’s cup and saucer.”

— Patti Smith

100. “When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I’m not interested in crimes. I’m interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist.”

— Patti Smith