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

302. “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

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

— Patti Smith

Featured in: Reading Quotes

304. “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

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

— Patti Smith

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Patti Smith

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Patti Smith

316. “Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.”

— Patti Smith

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Patti Smith

321. “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

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

— Patti Smith

323. “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

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

— Patti Smith

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Patti Smith

329. “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

330. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Patti Smith

340. “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

343. “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

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

— Patti Smith

345. “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

346. “I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin’, I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension.”

— Patti Smith

347. “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

348. “When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven’t published them.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

350. “I hate to be enclosed. I don’t like bathroom doors – I don’t shut them. In fact, in my house, I have no doors.”

— Patti Smith