Top 450 Patti Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Patti Smith

403. “And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

405. “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

406. “Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.”

— Patti Smith

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

— Patti Smith

408. “Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself?”

— Patti Smith

409. “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

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

— Patti Smith

411. “I know I’m a strong performer. I’m not an evolved musician.”

— Patti Smith

412. “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

413. “I’ve written a lot of prose. I just haven’t published it.”

— Patti Smith

414. “We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.”

— Patti Smith

415. “The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.”

— Patti Smith

416. “We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.”

— Patti Smith

417. “I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, “You can’t be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on.” It was a trauma.”

— Patti Smith

418. “All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don’t exist anymore. That’s why I love being in rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a whole life thing.”

— Patti Smith

419. “I didn’t write about aspects of my public life because that’s a small part of my life.”

— Patti Smith

420. “I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It’s just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.”

— Patti Smith

421. “How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.”

— Patti Smith

422. “The thing I’ve always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.”

— Patti Smith

423. “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

424. “Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.”

— Patti Smith

425. “I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It’s like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo.”

— Patti Smith

426. “You can never pay too much for peace of mind.”

— Patti Smith

427. “But then everything eventually changes. It’s the way of the world. Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.”

— Patti Smith

428. “Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

— Patti Smith

429. “There is no pure good, no pure evil, only purity.”

— Patti Smith

430. “I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can’t say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When.”

— Patti Smith

431. “It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

— Patti Smith

432. “I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called.”

— Patti Smith

433. “Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.”

— Patti Smith

434. “Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”

— Patti Smith

435. “Perhaps it’s not where we’re going but just that we go.”

— Patti Smith

436. “A stretch of time when I was rewarded with so many mystic moments, a chunk of red chalk, a chestnut, a rusted piece of scrap metal, a nail, a flat stone shaped like an ancient tablet. Although suggesting little of the magnificent work I had seen, these objects helped inspire my newfound contentedness. I placed them with the same care as a police detective into a clean plastic bag. Evidence of an awareness of the relative value of insignificant things.”

— Patti Smith

437. “In his heartlessness he had ignored nature, and how heartless nature was in return.”

— Patti Smith

438. “One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat.”

— Patti Smith

439. “Nothing really matches the atmosphere of the old Polaroid film. Except perhaps a poem, a musical phrase, or a forest hung with mist.”

— Patti Smith

440. “The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive.”

— Patti Smith

441. “I seldom visit people’s homes, for despite the hospitality offered I often suffer a feeling of confinement or imagined pressure.”

— Patti Smith

442. “Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.”

— Patti Smith

443. “How quickly it had charmed me. I imagined it transformed. A place to think, make spaghetti, brew coffee, a place to write.”

— Patti Smith

444. “I have always hated loose ends... If I read a book or see a film and some seemingly insignificant thing is left unresolved, I can get remarkably unsettled, going back and forth and looking for clues or wishing I had a number to call or that I could write someone a letter. Not to complain, but just to request clarification or to answer a few questions, so I can concentrate on other things.”

— Patti Smith

445. “Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset.”

— Patti Smith

446. “Despite all efforts, February just slips away, though being a leap year there is one extra day to observe.”

— Patti Smith

447. “He had ignored nature and now turned to her for his salvation, and set about to make peace with her, bowing to her mysteries.”

— Patti Smith

448. “I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.”

— Patti Smith

449. “All doots are open to the believer.”

— Patti Smith

450. “The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

— Patti Smith