Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I don’t think people should do biopics of living people. I’m totally opposed to that.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Patti Smith

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Patti Smith

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Patti Smith

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Patti Smith

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Patti Smith

324. “I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and my strong ones. My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Patti Smith

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

339. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— 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. “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

344. “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

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

— Patti Smith

346. “I had a really happy childhood – my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.”

— Patti Smith

347. “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

348. “What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn’t have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that’s startling or is so poignant.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith