Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Patti Smith

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

— 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. “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

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. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Patti Smith

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

226. “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

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

— Patti Smith

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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. “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

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

— Patti Smith

236. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Patti Smith

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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