Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.”

— Patti Smith

152. “I wasn’t taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn’t writing anything.”

— Patti Smith

153. “Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.”

— Patti Smith

154. “My sunglasses are like my guitar.”

— Patti Smith

155. “Well, I’m not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I’m performing, that’s what I’m doing. If I’m not, I don’t long for it. I don’t need the approval of an audience, or applause.”

— Patti Smith

156. “Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.”

— Patti Smith

157. “Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning.”

— Patti Smith

158. “We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”

— Patti Smith

159. “There’s nothing cool about being self-destructive.”

— Patti Smith

160. “I always enjoyed doing transgender songs.”

— Patti Smith

161. “And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.”

— Patti Smith

162. “Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.”

— Patti Smith

163. “I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.”

— Patti Smith

164. “Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.”

— Patti Smith

165. “I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.”

— Patti Smith

166. “I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. – You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. – How do I find it again? – Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.”

— Patti Smith

167. “Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money.”

— Patti Smith

168. “It’s no secret – I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all.”

— Patti Smith

169. “I’ve said this over and over, but I’ll say it a million more times – I’m concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we’re losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.”

— Patti Smith

170. “I knew he didn’t love me, but I adored him anyway.”

— Patti Smith

171. “You know, the dreams you had for me weren’t my dreams,” he said. “Maybe those dreamsare meant for you.”

— Patti Smith

172. “More like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.”

— Patti Smith

173. “Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”

— Patti Smith

174. “My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing – of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily.”

— Patti Smith

175. “I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.”

— Patti Smith

176. “We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn’t want to be without each other.”

— Patti Smith

177. “What I wanted to do in rock ’n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.”

— Patti Smith

178. “People say the media is feeding the public’s hunger for celebrity news, but that’s the drug pusher’s mentality. I don’t think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie’s babies if it weren’t being given to them in the first place.”

— Patti Smith

179. “A wind picked up and I could feel the sea within it.”

— Patti Smith

180. “I escaped into daydreams as I did my piecework. I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers. I’d brag that I was going to be an artist’s mistress one day. Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”

— Patti Smith

181. “Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”

— Patti Smith

182. “The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn’t an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits.”

— Patti Smith

183. “An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.”

— Patti Smith

184. “I hated the soup and felt little for the can.”

— Patti Smith

185. “A good artist’s always got his hand in his zipper.”

— Patti Smith

186. “Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.”

— Patti Smith

187. “Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.”

— Patti Smith

188. “Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”

— Patti Smith

189. “Grief isn’t all tears.”

— Patti Smith

190. “I felt alien my whole life, but I didn’t feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.”

— Patti Smith

191. “I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”

— Patti Smith

192. “I don’t think the area of Jerusalem should be part of a Jewish state; it belongs to all people, to Christians and Muslims and the Jewish people.”

— Patti Smith

193. “Nothing is a hobby – each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has ‘minor works’ that they do, but I don’t think I have any ‘minor disciplines.’”

— Patti Smith

194. “Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.”

— Patti Smith

195. “I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and my strong ones. My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.”

— Patti Smith

196. “No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.”

— Patti Smith

197. “Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.”

— Patti Smith

198. “I wasn’t a stranger to hard times. I used to read the Bible – well, I still do, but when I was young I read the Bible quite a bit.”

— Patti Smith

199. “If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.”

— Patti Smith

200. “Hung-up women can’t produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain’t no room for mediocre art.”

— Patti Smith