Keith richards quotes

My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.

And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues.

You get onstage and make other people feel happy. Make them feel good.

One guy can ruin an instrument. Jimi Hendrix, bless his heart - how I wish he was still around - almost inadvertently ruined guitar. Because he was the only cat who could do it like that. Everybody else just screwed it up, and thought wailing away (on the guitar) is the answer. But it ain't; you've got to be a Jimi to do that, you've got to be one of the special cats.

The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do.

You don't find a style. A style finds you

You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.

But I've always felt very comfortable on stage, even if I screw up. It always felt like a dog, this is my turf, piss around it. While I'm here, nothing else can happen. All I can do is screw up. Otherwise, have a good time.

It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.

I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It's really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.

There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

The idea of retiring is like killing yourself. It's almost like Hari Kari. I intend to live to a 100 and go down in history.

If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep.

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

I've got nothing against daylight. I don't live totally nocturnally. Only when I feel like it. Which is most of the time.

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.

I never thought I was wasted, but I probably was.

What is life but playing with time?

I don't know if people in New York recognize me or not. I'm not really conscious of it. If somebody stops me, then I suddenly realize that people are looking at me, but other times they may be doing it and I don't even know because I'm engrossed in something else.

I don't trust doctors. It's not to say there ain't some good ones, but on a general level, no, I wouldn't trust 'em at all.

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant. ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer.

To me, my biggest fear is getting a big head, and that is when I get the hammer. Because it's very easy in this game to believe you're something special.

To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That's the reason I'm still alive.

I never plan anything, which is probably the difference between Mick and myself. Mick needs to know what he's gonna do tomorrow and I'm just happy to wake up to see who's hanging around. Mick's rock and I'm roll.

I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.

If you're cool, you don't know nothing about it. It just is, or you ain't.

Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.

You're always learning about this thing everytime you pick it up

I'm not getting old I'm evolving.

I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.

It might appear that nothing is happening, but that's actually when it really happens.

I have no idea what the audience makes of me.

To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you.

One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience

A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.

I don't regret nuthin.

About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.

You're sitting with some guys, and you're playing and you go, "Ooh, yeah!" That feeling is worth more than anything. There's a certain moment when you realize that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you've been to a special place.

I don't wave a flag for anything. I'm a musician.

There was a knock on our dressing-room door. Our manager shouted, 'Keith! Ron! The Police are here!' Oh, man, we panicked, flushed everything down the john. Then the door opened and it was Stewart Copeland and Sting.

This is the rock 'n' roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.

I personally believe that most people that play an instrument would be able to write a few songs here and there. But they say, "I tried, I can't do it" and give up and don't try it again; they get too discouraged.

If you say I'm great, thank you very much. But I know what I am. I could be better, man, you know?

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It's the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: 'He passed it on.'

Let me be clear about this. I don't have a drug problem. I have a police problem.

The Stones in a club is still the ultimate rush.

If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use both feet.

I only get ill when I give up drugs... I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

When I listen to what I did under the influence - 10 years of work - I don't think it either enhanced or impaired me. It didn't have that much to do with it.

We age not by holding on to youth, but by letting ourselves grow and embracing whatever youthful parts remain.

George Jones is a national treasure and should be treated accordingly. A unique style so often emulated even inadvertently.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.

I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused.

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

There's just certain styles of playing that you do play in your own way. Maybe it's in the way your fingers bend, for all I know. And so whenever you pick up the guitar it's not so much the sound of the instrument itself, it's like the ting that you add onto it-the attitude.

I'm all for a quiet life. I just didn't get one.

Why would you want to be anything else if you're Mick Jagger?

I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.

Everybody starts by imitating their heroes. For me it was Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.

I've never had my hair cut by anybody, I do it all myself.

In fact, I take the view that God, in his infinite wisdom, didn't bother to spring for two joints - heaven and hell. They're the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mummy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and play your harps. Hell is the same place - no fire and brimstone - but they just all pass by and don't see you. There's nothing, no recognition. You're waving, “It's me, your father,” but you're invisible. You're on a cloud, you've got your harp, but you can't play with nobody because they don't see you. That's hell.

There's a demon in me, and he's still around. Without the dope, we have a bit more of a chat these days.

The public library is the great equaliser.

The electric guitar was vital in helping what I've achieved where would I be without it? Playing awfully quietly, for a start.

My life is full of broken halos.

Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

We all have our own personal laboratories. Life is an experiment, and it's just a matter of getting the alchemical or chemical combination right.

Everybody thinks you reach a certain age and you're a grownup, but it's not true. Nobody grows up until the day they croak.

You can't accuse me of anything I haven't already confessed to.

What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We'd do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can't go into a shop and ask for a "lead guitar". You're a guitar player, and you play a guitar.

I like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?

I was number 1 on the who's likely to die list for 10 years...I was really disappointed when I fell off that list.

When you're 20, you can't imagine being 30. When you're 30, you can't imagine being 40. When you're 40, you can't imagine being 100.

Yes, I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

Whatever side I take, I know well that I will be blamed.

[joking about the length of the Rolling Stones' career] You have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe - and you have the Rolling Stones!

To make a rock'n'roll record, technology is the least important thing.

Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.

I am not doing it just for the money or for you.I am doing it for me.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

What's the big deal about still working? Retirement age is sixty-five, and that's at a normal job - and I ain't there yet.

Some things get better with age. Like me.

Fame has killed more very talented guys than drugs. Jimi Hendrix didn't die of an overdose, he died of fame.

Some of my most outrageous nights- I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I'm famous for partying! The ultimate party- if it's any good- you can't remember it.

I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.

The rock's easy, but the roll is another thing.

I'm an unpure purist, something like that.

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.

To me, it's important to prove that this isn't just teenage kids' s**t and you should feel embarrassed when you're over forty and still doing it.

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.

Poison's not bad. It's a matter of how much.

Retire? I can't spell the word. I'd play in a wheelchair.

If you've gotta think about being cool, you ain't cool.

Everyone talks about rock these days; the problem is they forget about the roll.

It's great to be here. It's great to be anywhere.

Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money

I haven't stopped smoking...anything

Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is the diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

Rap - so many words, so little said.

Music works in mysterious ways. Once it goes in you have no idea what it can do to you.

It's a privilege just to wake up to a new day.

I'd been an expert at taking beatings. Then I had a lucky break where I did a bully in, by total sheer luck. ... One minute I was the mark, and with just one swift move, I put the big man in school down. ... Once he was down, the whole atmosphere in the schoolyard changed. A huge cloud seemed to be lifted from me. ... I'd never been aware the cloud was so large.

You've got the sun, you've got the moon, and you've got the Rolling Stones.

I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor . Everything was there in his playing - the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.

Songwriting's a weird game.

If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted elegantly.

Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

Some people think I'm a mythical genius, others think I'm a junkie madman.

No broken hearts, no broken necks.

True friends. Hardest thing to find, but you never look for them - they found you ; you just grow into each other

Anything you throw yourself into, you better get yourself out of.

I'm free of hypochondria-- although I've got everything else.

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

Guitar is easy, all it takes is 5 fingers, 6 strings and 1 a**hole

I've never turned blue in someone else's bathroom. I consider that the height of bad manners.

I read the Bible sometimes, but it bores me to death. I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.

One minute I'm standing at Ronnie Scott's getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I'm on a marble slab

I don't encourage anybody to do what I do, you know? Why should you? More for me!

It's an addiction... and addiction is something I should know something about.

Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.

But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: "Do you know this feeling?

[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.

I never sleep alone. If there is no one to sleep next to, I'll sleep next to a stuffed animal. It makes me feel secure and safe. It's a little embarrassing to admit it; I'm an old man now. It's important to me though.