Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 6 of 9

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

258. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Patti Smith

264. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— 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. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “I liked being on stage, I just didn’t like the theatrical aspect of being in front of people.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

274. “I never really wanted to be a singer – not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer.”

— Patti Smith

275. “I’d try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock ‘n’ roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.”

— Patti Smith

276. “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

277. “After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.”

— Patti Smith

278. “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

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

— Patti Smith

280. “I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God.”

— Patti Smith

281. “Everyone thinks of God as a man – you can’t help it – Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.”

— Patti Smith

282. “A lot of children don’t have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester.”

— Patti Smith

283. “If I’m really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don’t even think about brushing my hair.”

— Patti Smith

284. “What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.”

— Patti Smith

285. “May the world’s small things fill her with delight.”

— Patti Smith

286. “Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.”

— Patti Smith

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

291. “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

292. “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

293. “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”

— Patti Smith

294. “The process of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.”

— Patti Smith

295. “For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world.”

— Patti Smith

296. “The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.”

— Patti Smith

297. “My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.”

— Patti Smith

298. “For me, personally, I think drugs are sacred and should be used for work. That’s what I believe in. Drugs have a real shamanistic value. I can handle drugs. I’ve never had a problem.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

300. “I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.”

— Patti Smith