Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.”

— Patti Smith

252. “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

253. “For a brief moment I felt as if I might die; and just as quickly I knew everything would be all right.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

255. “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

256. “Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. – This is how I live, I am thinking.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

259. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

262. “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

263. “I’m certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

— Patti Smith

264. “I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.”

— Patti Smith

265. “I’ve lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.”

— Patti Smith

266. “My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring.”

— Patti Smith

267. “Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don’t follow him.”

— Patti Smith

268. “Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.”

— Patti Smith

269. “Truthfully, I don’t really think of myself as a photographer. I don’t have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who’s spent their life devoted to photography.”

— Patti Smith

270. “I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.”

— Patti Smith

271. “Ultimately, we are not seeking others to bow to, but to reinforce our individual natures, to help us suffer our own choices, to guide us on our own particular journeys.”

— Patti Smith

272. “Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

275. “You don’t want to OD on improvisation.”

— Patti Smith

276. “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

277. “Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down “Desolation Row.” I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.”

— Patti Smith

278. “When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?”

— Patti Smith

279. “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

280. “The priest had been kind but could not draw her out. Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy than the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.”

— Patti Smith

281. “My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn’t come anymore, but I had his support.”

— Patti Smith

282. “I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.”

— Patti Smith

283. “I didn’t begin my life in 1975 with ‘Horses.’ I recorded ‘Horses’ in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969.”

— Patti Smith

284. “In 1974, when I started working with the material that became ‘Horses,’ a lot of our great voices had died. We’d lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.”

— Patti Smith

285. “The thing is, it’s not uncool to worry about people who seem like they’re going on the wrong path. There’s nothing cool about being self-destructive.”

— Patti Smith

286. “When I’m on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.”

— Patti Smith

287. “I was real religious when I was young. I wanted to be a missionary.”

— Patti Smith

288. “I don’t think people should do biopics of living people. I’m totally opposed to that.”

— Patti Smith

289. “I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur.”

— Patti Smith

290. “More than anything, that’s been the thread through my life – the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it’s taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.”

— Patti Smith

291. “Not all dreams need to be realized.”

— Patti Smith

292. “My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others.”

— Patti Smith

293. “I started resenting how much art robs from life. I’d go to a party and I couldn’t enjoy myself, even sexually. All I could think was how I was going to reinvent the experience into a piece of art.”

— Patti Smith

294. “It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.”

— Patti Smith

295. “We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.”

— Patti Smith

296. “As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.”

— Patti Smith

297. “Behind her smile I could see o many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted.”

— Patti Smith

298. “I think I work in two worlds. I’ll always try to kick through a wall. I did that when I was younger and I still have my way of doing that.”

— Patti Smith

299. “I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.”

— Patti Smith

300. “Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that’s what I wanted to wear everyday.”

— Patti Smith