Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 9

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Patti Smith

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Patti Smith

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Patti Smith

213. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

217. “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

218. “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

219. “We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

227. “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

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

— Patti Smith

229. “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

230. “I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.”

— Patti Smith

231. “Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

233. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

242. “I wasn’t thinking so much of music. I wasnt thinking so much of perfection or stardom or any of that stuff.”

— Patti Smith

243. “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

244. “If I have any regrets, I could say that I’m sorry I wasn’t a better writer or a better singer.”

— Patti Smith

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “I’ve never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they’re not going to be great writers.”

— Patti Smith

250. “Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.”

— Patti Smith