Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

254. “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

255. “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

256. “The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.”

— Patti Smith

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Patti Smith

261. “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

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

— Patti Smith

263. “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

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

— Patti Smith

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Patti Smith

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

285. “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

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

— Patti Smith

287. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Patti Smith

293. “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

294. “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

295. “Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

297. “All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.”

— Patti Smith

298. “Christianity made us think there’s one heaven.”

— Patti Smith

299. “I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I’ll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.”

— Patti Smith

300. “I’m pretty moral about what I do. If I didn’t think I was worthy of doing something, I wouldn’t do it. I ain’t gonna waste a bunch of people’s time.”

— Patti Smith