Patricia Lee Smith is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and poet who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. These Patti Smith quotes will motivate you.
Best Patti Smith Quotes
- “Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free.” ~ Patti Smith
- “If you don’t have what you need, just rock with what you’ve got!” ~ Patti Smith
- “Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.” ~ Patti Smith
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“We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” ~ Patti Smith
- “My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We’re all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.” ~ Patti Smith
- “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake.” ~ Patti Smith
- “To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.” ~ Patti Smith
- “For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Freedom is…the right to write the wrong words.” ~ Patti Smith
- “If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I’m right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age …if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they’re alive … the time to flower is now.” ~ Patti Smith
- “When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.” ~ Patti Smith Quotes
- “People have the power to redeem the work of fools.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I daydream a lot – that’s how I get my ideas. If I’m sitting in a café, I’m not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.” ~ Patti Smith
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“I’m here right now and I want now to be the greatest time.” ~ Patti Smith
- “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.” ~ Patti Smith
- “The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I think I’m constantly in a state of adjustment.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.” ~ Patti Smith
- “What will happen to us?” I asked. “There will always be us,” he answered.” ~ Patti Smith
- “To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I wasn’t attractive, I wasn’t very verbal, I wasn’t very smart in school. I wasn’t anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going… I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical… I just knew it.” ~ Patti Smith
- “No one expected me. Everything awaited me.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Got to lose control before you take control.” ~ Patti Smith
- “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.” ~ Patti Smith
- “That’s what artists do, that’s what poets do – we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we’ve made in order to get to the core place where we started from.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I’ve always thrived on the encouragement of others.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.” ~ Patti Smith
- “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Love is an angel disguised as lust.” ~ Patti Smith
- “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 about doing good work. Protect your work and if you build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency. Life is like a roller coaster ride, it is never going to be perfect. It is going to have perfect moments and rough spots, but it’s all worth it.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I’m writing a poem or drawing, I’m not a female; I’m an artist.” ~ Patti Smith Quotes
- “Most women writers don’t interest me because they’re hung up with being a woman, they’re hung up with being Jewish, they’re hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.” ~ Patti Smith
- “People need space to air out their thoughts, to have a sense of themselves – unfettered by anything.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Pissing in a river, watching it rise.” ~ Patti Smith
- “We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I think really that’s just the basic Christian lesson that sometimes takes us years and years to understand – have equal concern for another human being as you have for yourself or perhaps even more concern for another human being than you have for yourself.” ~ Patti Smith
- “The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can’t give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.” ~ Patti Smith
- “We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don’t follow him.” ~ Patti Smith
- “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag.” ~ Patti Smith
- “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
- “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.” ~ Patti Smith
- “We all make choices. Believe me, I would like to write the hit of the world. It’s not like I have any desire to be in the shadows. My vision isn’t marketing. Some people want to sell 6 million albums. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I do. I’d rather look at a piece of work and say it’s great rather than it’s successful.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I never really wanted to be a singer – not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer.” ~ Patti Smith
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“Rock n’ roll is dream soup, what’s your brand?” ~ Patti Smith
- “The people have the power to redeem the work of fools. Upon the meek the graces shower, it’s decreed the people rule.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I always thought my father [influenced me most] because he was so well-read, I tried to model myself on him, but really as I go through life I realize it was my mother who gave me the most valuable instructions. I didn’t understand or accept it at the time. She taught me to read and to pray – two things that have really stayed with me.” ~ Patti Smith
- “I don’t think the average American understands what patriotism truthfully is. That’s why when I attack our country or attack the government, it’s sometimes looked at as unpatriotic. It’s not.” ~ Patti Smith
- “We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink.” ~ Patti Smith
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“These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to wear red lipstick.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through.” ~ Patti Smith
- “Life is like a roller coaster. It’s never going to be perfect – it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it’s all worth it.” ~ Patti Smith
- “My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each, I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.” ~ Patti Smith
