Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Patti Smith

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

209. “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

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

— Patti Smith

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— 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 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

224. “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

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

— Patti Smith

227. “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

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

— Patti Smith

229. “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

230. “My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through ’50s and early-’60s fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

236. “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

237. “My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I’d spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.”

— Patti Smith

238. “I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

245. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— 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. “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

250. “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