Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Patti Smith

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Patti Smith

208. “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

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

— Patti Smith

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

219. “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

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

— Patti Smith

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Patti Smith

233. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Patti Smith

240. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

243. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

246. “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

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

— Patti Smith

248. “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

249. “My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people’s tax returns.”

— Patti Smith

250. “The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.”

— Patti Smith