Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor.”

— Patti Smith

154. “I always enjoyed doing transgender songs.”

— Patti Smith

155. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Patti Smith

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Patti Smith

173. “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

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

— Patti Smith

175. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

178. “The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

180. “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

181. “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

182. “Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.”

— Patti Smith

183. “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

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

— Patti Smith

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

189. “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

190. “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

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. “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

193. “New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock ‘n’ roll belongs to the people.”

— Patti Smith

194. “I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

196. “New York is the thing that seduced me.”

— Patti Smith

197. “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

198. “The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.”

— Patti Smith

199. “Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.”

— Patti Smith

200. “All of my role models, whether it was the disciples, or John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud, slept under the stars.”

— Patti Smith