Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Writing is not some quiet, closet act.”

— Patti Smith

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Patti Smith

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone’s vision, because in the end, that’s what you got: your clay in someone else’s hands.”

— Patti Smith

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

365. “Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.”

— Patti Smith

366. “In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter.”

— Patti Smith

367. “Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.”

— Patti Smith

368. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

374. “There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.”

— Patti Smith

375. “When I perform I always opt for communication with God and in pursuit of communicating with God you can fall into some very dangerous territory. I have also come to realize that total communication with God is physical death.”

— Patti Smith

376. “My public life was so demanding that I wasn’t doing the things that I deemed the most important.”

— Patti Smith

377. “William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.”

— Patti Smith

378. “I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.”

— Patti Smith

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

389. “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

390. “You don’t see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.”

— Patti Smith

391. “I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. 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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

394. “That’s the one with the magic, he would say.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

396. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

399. “I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith