Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Patti Smith

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

362. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

388. “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

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

395. “Christmas was coming and there was a pervasive melancholy, as if everyone simultaneously remembered they had nowhere to go. Even.”

— Patti Smith

396. “I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith