Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I liked being on stage, I just didn’t like the theatrical aspect of being in front of people.”

— Patti Smith

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

307. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

310. “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

311. “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

312. “As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.”

— Patti Smith

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Patti Smith

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Patti Smith

324. “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

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

— Patti Smith

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Patti Smith

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Patti Smith

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.”

— Patti Smith

343. “The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

346. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

349. “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

350. “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