Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Grief isn’t all tears.”

— Patti Smith

202. “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

203. “I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

205. “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

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

— Patti Smith

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

213. “Question everything.”

— Patti Smith

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

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

— Patti Smith

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Patti Smith

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Patti Smith

241. “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

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

— Patti Smith

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

248. “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

249. “For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith