Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I was never going to become anything but myself, that i was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up.”

— Patti Smith

202. “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

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

— Patti Smith

204. “I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I’m home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.”

— Patti Smith

205. “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

206. “But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.”

— Patti Smith

207. “Lisbon is a good city to get lost in. Mornings in cafes scribbling in yet another notebook, each blank page offering escape, the pen serving, fluid and constant. I sleep well, dream little, simply exists within an uninterrupted interlude.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

209. “When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William’s secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

211. “I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what’s most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.”

— Patti Smith

212. “I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”

— Patti Smith

213. “I don’t know about that. I’m not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I’ve often quoted Walt Whitman’s phrase “I contain multitudes.” I understand that.”

— Patti Smith

214. “I didn’t know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.”

— Patti Smith

215. “My father hated rock and roll – hated it. My first real argument with my father was over the Rolling Stones. And he never, ever liked rock and roll. He just liked me.”

— Patti Smith

216. “Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?”

— Patti Smith

217. “The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.”

— Patti Smith

218. “I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling between my legs and I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know girls masturbated. I never touched myself or anything...”

— Patti Smith

219. “Just because I’ve extricated myself from religion doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It’s a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.”

— Patti Smith

220. “I’m an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.”

— Patti Smith

221. “I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.”

— Patti Smith

222. “My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.”

— Patti Smith

223. “My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.”

— Patti Smith

224. “Your soul was like a network of spittle.”

— Patti Smith

225. “I think it’s important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.”

— Patti Smith

226. “I’ve embraced rock ‘n’ roll because it encompasses all the things I’m interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism – all of these things can be found in rock ‘n’ roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.”

— Patti Smith

227. “He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place of no beginning or end.”

— Patti Smith

228. “Obviously, I’m not homeless. I’m not an old alcoholic. I’m not jumping trains. I just like to live in a certain way.”

— Patti Smith

229. “It was February 14 and I was about to give my heart to a perfect cup of coffee.”

— Patti Smith

230. “Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.”

— Patti Smith

231. “Maybe I’ll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.”

— Patti Smith

232. “I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.”

— Patti Smith

233. “I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn’t vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.”

— Patti Smith

234. “How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”

— Patti Smith

235. “If your label won’t let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave!”

— Patti Smith

236. “My mother answers all my fan mail.”

— Patti Smith

237. “In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.”

— Patti Smith

238. “People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.”

— Patti Smith

239. “If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.”

— Patti Smith

240. “I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.”

— Patti Smith

241. “My father was a dreamy fellow – he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.”

— Patti Smith

242. “The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don’t think their dirty parts are any good, really.”

— Patti Smith

243. “I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.”

— Patti Smith

244. “My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.”

— Patti Smith

245. “Sure I destroyed my guitar at every concert, but it was okay, because I’d always get a shiny new one the very next day.”

— Patti Smith

246. “The only way I can lose my mind in bed is to destroy myself in a fantasy.”

— Patti Smith

247. “You can’t carve up the world. It’s not a pie.”

— Patti Smith

248. “Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you’re communicating with people, and you’re not in a void. On the other hand, because you’re always creating and transforming, art always separates you – always.”

— Patti Smith

249. “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.”

— Patti Smith

250. “Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?”

— Patti Smith