Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.”

— Patti Smith

303. “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

304. “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

305. “And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos – the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?”

— Patti Smith

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “I’m not saying I wasn’t flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.”

— Patti Smith

310. “Writing is not some quiet, closet act.”

— Patti Smith

311. “I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in. Todd.”

— Patti Smith

312. “I’m more concerned with the work people do than their gender. When I was younger, I was pretty judgmental. Things had to be a certain way. Now I just want to see the work. It doesn’t matter who does it.”

— Patti Smith

313. “I was never a singer; I can’t play any instruments; I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn’t have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern.”

— Patti Smith

314. “I’m not much a role model in terms of hair care, though.”

— Patti Smith

315. “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

316. “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

317. “I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations – the sense of uselessness.”

— Patti Smith

318. “By the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, “I’m done. I’m never going to be a missionary,” because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood.”

— Patti Smith

319. “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

320. “Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.”

— Patti Smith

321. “Just come back, I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.”

— Patti Smith

322. “Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.”

— Patti Smith

323. “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

324. “In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter.”

— Patti Smith

325. “In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen – a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children – I learned a lot.”

— Patti Smith

326. “Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.”

— Patti Smith

327. “Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”

— Patti Smith

328. “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

329. “People don’t realize we have these built-in seven-league boots. The body can go anywhere. It is physically capable of sustaining almost any kind of abuse, or any dream.”

— Patti Smith

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

334. “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

335. “I’ve always considered myself a writer.”

— Patti Smith

336. “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

337. “You don’t follow plots you negotiate them.”

— Patti Smith

338. “But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”

— Patti Smith

339. “I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.”

— Patti Smith

340. “There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.”

— Patti Smith

341. “When I perform I always opt for communication with God and in pursuit of communicating with God you can fall into some very dangerous territory. I have also come to realize that total communication with God is physical death.”

— Patti Smith

342. “It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.”

— Patti Smith

343. “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

344. “Usually when I go to a place for the first time, unless there’s something historical or spectacular that nature has to offer, the first thing I like to do is see what’s on the minds of the people.”

— Patti Smith

345. “I was thinking about what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dali. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: “You are like a crow, a gothic crow.”

— Patti Smith

346. “People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone’s vision, because in the end, that’s what you got: your clay in someone else’s hands.”

— Patti Smith

347. “My public life was so demanding that I wasn’t doing the things that I deemed the most important.”

— Patti Smith

348. “He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.”

— Patti Smith

349. “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

350. “I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.”

— Patti Smith