Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Patti Smith

305. “Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

307. “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

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

— Patti Smith

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility to negotiate the gears winding backwards uniting all time.”

— Patti Smith

312. “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

313. “What is the heart but a small hand of agonies?”

— Patti Smith

314. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

317. “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

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

— Patti Smith

319. “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

320. “I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, ‘I want a book by this person.’ And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.”

— Patti Smith

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Patti Smith

324. “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

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

— Patti Smith

326. “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

327. “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

328. “If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special.”

— Patti Smith

329. “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

330. “I hated the makeup. I hated all that pancake makeup. I didn’t really like dressing for parts.”

— Patti Smith

331. “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

332. “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

333. “I don’t know why, the very first word on my very first record is ‘Jesus.’ I still invoke him as an entity to reckon with.”

— Patti Smith

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Patti Smith

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

340. “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

341. “I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

343. “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

344. “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

345. “I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t drawing, and personality-wise, I was just completely arrogant. I’m not trying to be overly apologetic for my behavior – I wasn’t evil. The lifestyle I had was one that lent itself to becoming more and more self-involved.”

— Patti Smith

346. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

349. “Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.”

— Patti Smith

350. “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