Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

257. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

266. “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

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

— Patti Smith

268. “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

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

— Patti Smith

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Patti Smith

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

280. “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

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

— Patti Smith

282. “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

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

— Patti Smith

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Patti Smith

287. “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

288. “I’m a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I’m happy.”

— Patti Smith

289. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

292. “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

293. “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

294. “Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Patti Smith

300. “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