Top 400 Patti Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “People say hello to me. I mean, sometimes the sanitation truck goes by and says, hey Patti...”

— Patti Smith

354. “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

356. “My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn’t come anymore, but I had his support.”

— Patti Smith

357. “When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.”

— Patti Smith

358. “It’s not that I have compromised or anything, but it’s always been important to me to take good care of myself and be a good example. I’m not much a role model in terms of hair care, though.”

— Patti Smith

359. “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

360. “Americans just don’t know what being a movie star’s all about.”

— Patti Smith

361. “These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.”

— Patti Smith

362. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

365. “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

366. “I’m not really a nostalgic person.”

— Patti Smith

367. “My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music.”

— Patti Smith

368. “I wanted to go to Portland because it’s a really good book town.”

— Patti Smith

369. “I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.”

— Patti Smith

370. “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

371. “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

372. “I hate being confined, especially when it’s for my own good.”

— Patti Smith

373. “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

374. “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

375. “An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn’t know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.”

— Patti Smith

376. “I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

378. “Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.”

— Patti Smith

379. “I know from an early age that I’m very comfortable in front of people. When I was a young girl, I’d love giving book reports.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

381. “I’ve always thrived on the encouragement of others.”

— Patti Smith

382. “I could have a job as a teacher because I like talking in front of people.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

384. “I wrote to give myself something to read.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

386. “Some things are not lost but sacrificed.”

— Patti Smith

387. “Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. – This is how I live, I am thinking.”

— Patti Smith

388. “These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one’s action. – Patti Smith.”

— Patti Smith

389. “He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.”

— Patti Smith

390. “I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are.”

— Patti Smith

391. “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

392. “Fate has a hand but is not the hand.”

— Patti Smith

393. “Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures.”

— Patti Smith

394. “I commenced with my chores, whistling an oft-forgotten tune, certain that we, as the seasons, prevail and that ten thousand years is yet a blink in the eye of a ringed planet or that of an archangel armed with a sword of glass.”

— Patti Smith

395. “Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.”

— Patti Smith

396. “I always wear the same thing onstage.”

— Patti Smith

397. “I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.”

— Patti Smith

398. “There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it’s really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.”

— Patti Smith

399. “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

400. “I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it.”

— Patti Smith