Mick jagger quotes

I like to have a peek, see what the audience is doing during the opening act, because it gives you a clue and gives you a good feeling of where you are - the air can be different in different places.

I love America, but I can't spend the whole year here. I can't afford the taxes.

I don't like drugs. I think cocaine is a very bad, habit-forming bore. It's about the most boring drug ever invented.

You don't always do the same things you've done the night before. That's what makes playing live so interesting as opposed to being in the studio.

It's Only Rock and Roll.

People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it's self-sustaining.

Too much is never enough.

You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

It's heartening to return to live music, heartening for people like me in a band. It's a very traditional thing to return to. It re-validates the original form that we fell in love with.

I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, but how boring is that?

I can't get no satisfaction.

All dancing is a replacement for sex.

Well, don't we all feel like jumping to the end of the world sometimes?

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I'm tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.

I'm interested in feedback and learning what people want. It's a tricky thing for me when I do a set list. You get bored doing the same songs. Let's say we do one ballad in two hours, and it's "Wild Horses." If you say, I'm tired of that, let's try something less well known, and then you're out there stumbling through this song you just relearned at sound check, and you realize people probably want "Wild Horses" instead of this. You do need to do some songs that aren't so well known. The question is how many? I'm open to people posting their requests.

Normally I am not so violent. Everything comes from the question: Where will I die? It is a strong concern.

Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.

It's a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn't have gone on with it.

I should think that being my old lady would be all the satisfaction or career any woman needs.

I don't hate journalists. You can't hate a class of people. It's wrong to say that. But I do think they're a bit like poison. Never trust them. You can't trust them as a class of people. It's their job not to be trusted.

People think they know you. They know the things about you that you have forgotten.

I don't like being completely isolated. I need the energy from other people.

There's no absolutes in life - only vodka.

No one, but no one, is equal, or ever will be. Elvis was and is supreme.

If you're the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else.

The music's rehearsed a lot. All people think about is, they think, in rock 'n' roll, they get the music off right and they think it's okay standing, looking macho. Well, it's not. That's boring. If you want to be a performer you've got to do a lot more work than that.

Any performer is one person privately and then he's another person when he steps on the stage.

I've managed to avoid tattoos so far.

Rock 'n' roll and playing live is very addictive. But you have to really be careful, because you don't want to do it all the time. It's like when you are young and you think if you are not having sex you're wasting your time. But as you get older you realise everything has its place. It's the same thing with performing.... Performing is a great thing to do but you don't want to have to be doing it every night.

Rock has to absorb other rhythmic forms, because the underlying rhythm of music changes with fashion, and people like to move differently, and the underlying rhythms have to be the ones that people want to dance to.

I think, like most people, my moral values tend to be pretty fuzzy.

I wasn't taking so many drugs that it was messing up my creative processes. It was a very good period, 1968 - there was a good feeling in the air. It was a very creative period for everyone.

People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.

If you're really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.

You wake up in the morning and you look at your old spoon, and you say to yourself, 'Mick, it's time to get yourself a new spoon.' And you do.

It's okay to let yourself go, just as long as you let yourself back.

My father was furious with me, absolutely furious. I'm sure he wouldn't have been so mad if I'd have volunteered to join the army. Anything but this. He couldn't believe it. I agree with him: It wasn't a viable career opportunity.

I believe we should encourage children to sing and play instruments from an early age.

Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.

The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.

In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They've got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens.

I have to get up the fitness level, sing a lot, practice, get in the mood, and generally do lots of rehearsal. Get your body and mind ready.

If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.

The elusive nature of love... it can be such a fleeting thing. You see it there and it's just fluttering and it's gone.

I'm very ambivalent in my feelings about marriage. I think it promises a lot to people... sort of like saying, once you get married you are on the highway to heaven, and quite often it isn't that. I think marriage has always been based on a combination of religious and legal reasons.

I prefer to live in a rented house. No ties. Nothing around my neck. Just the minimum kind of bare comforts of home.

I remember when I was very young, I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said, 'You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly.

Anyone taking heroin is thinking about taking heroin more than they're thinking about anything else. That's the general rule about most drugs.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.

The Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has just published the story of her life. I confess that it is not in my reading table.

As long as my face is on page one, I don't care what they say about me on page seventeen.

I don't really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn't really worry me even if it's like out of place. At least it's relevant.

A good thing never ends.

You can't always get what you want.

I don't think that being in a full-time relationship is necessarily for everybody all of the time. It's not necessarily some state of grace.

Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.

Life's just a cocktail party - on the street.

It's not selling out, it is called making lots of money.

I think it's very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don't talk about. That's why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits.

My mother has always been unhappy with what I do. She would rather I do something nicer, like be a bricklayer.

When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can't force them to like it.

Always as a musician you must have one thing you do well.

Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

Lets drink to the hard working people Lets drink to the salt of the earth

I, personally, have a lot of energy, so I don't see it as an immediate problem.

You start out playing rock 'n' roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock 'n' roll and have sex.

That's one of the good things about a lot of the young British bands, they are mixing all styles of music. I think that's very good because that's very now.

Americans shocked me by their behavior and their narrow-mindedness.

Thank you for leaving us alone but giving us enough attention to boost our egos.

I was having a bit of trouble. I wasn't in a good relationship. Or I was in too many bad relationships. I had so many girlfriends at that point. None of them seemed to care they weren't pleasing me very much. I was obviously in with the wrong group.

In England you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.

Time is on my side, yes it is.

Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.

Casanova, he had no money and no power, and according to some, he even was cute. But he had talent to live, and some literature talent. I love how he invented himself.

I read the most extravagant things about people who suffer and depress because of things written about them.

I always think it's better to be not taking drugs or drinking or anything. That's not saying I've never done it because I have. But I sort of learned I think after a while there has been - it didn't take me that long to realize that it wasn't a good thing.

I got nasty habits; I take tea at three.

I don't think enjoying life is an exclusive prerogative of young people.

Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.

You know, being in a rock band, you can't overdo the costume changes too much because everyone thinks, oh, that's not a real rock band. Look how many times he changes costumes. That's not rock. Rock's about going on in a T-shirt and staying in it and getting it all dirty. But that's not really my approach.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.

I don't want to be my extravert self all the time.

I don't want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn't bear to end up like Elvis Presley in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.

Most people in England don't live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South.

Of course, I do occasionally arouse primeval instincts, but I mean, most men can do that. They can't do it to so many. I just happen to be able to do it to several thousand people. It's fun to do that.

Music should elevate you. You can be raised, or left stranded. You can't be raised all the time, in my experience. This might be a rare moment. You might just go up to that level but that's always good.

Only a madman or an actor would want to be President of the United States.

I would hate to say as a non-African-American person that it would be wrong for a black person to direct white people in a movie. Wouldn't that be awful of me to say that? The only sympathizing thing I might say for people that want to [grumble] is that a filmmaker should have an understanding for the place where the people you're portraying are coming from.

I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs.

You never really know what's going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they're going to behave.

I don't know if rock is dying. I wouldn't want to say that, but the world does change. Nothing stays the same.

Americans are funny people: first you shock them, then they put you in a museum.

I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

I'm not the businessman. I don't deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I've run out of money, I have to go and make some more.

When we heard we were topping the bill over James Brown we couldn't believe it. We tried for two days to get it changed round - I mean you can't follow an act like that.

I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek.

A lot of times songs are very much of a moment, that you just encapsulate. They come to you, you write them, you feel good that day, or bad that day.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

He stole my music but he gave me my name.

I don't spend money on anything. I don't collect anything. I don't spend it on furniture.

It's hard to believe that you did so many drugs for so long. That's what I find really hard. And didn't really consider it. It was eating and drinking and taking drugs and having sex. It was just part of life.

Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up.

Don’t take life too seriously and always remember: it is just a passing fad.

I think people are afraid to express their opinions half the time.

They're so boring. They're so pathetic, all those journalists. Most of them are. Most of those kind that write gossip stuff, and most of it's gossip. Things are just invented about your personal life and you just have to take that. It's bullshit. People believe it, though. They just believe everything they read.

Dandelions don't tell no lies.

It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.

I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.

I liked John a lot. He was the one I really got on with the most. We weren't buddy-buddies but we were always friendly. But after the Beatles and the Stones stopped playing clubs, we didn't see each other that much until he separated from Yoko, around 1974. We got really friendly again. And when he went back with Yoko, he went into hibernation ... when I went to visit someone in the Dakota, I'd leave him a note saying: 'I live next door: I know you don't want to see anyone, but if you do, please call.' He never did.

There's hundreds of different ways of writing songs.

I don't want to be singing Satisfaction when I'm 40.

Of course we're doing it for the money. We've always done it for the money.

I didn't have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, "Well, I can do this." And I liked doing it.

I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It's true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.

You can't be jealous and be a leader.

One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.

I don't only like rock music. There are other forms of music that I find interesting. I would want to do everything, every kind of music. I wouldn't want to be limited to like playing heavy metal or whatever.

I am conservative with a small 'c.' It's possible to be conservative in fiscal policy, and tolerant on moral issues or questions of freedom of expression.

There is something I like about talking to journalists that really goes beyond promotion because you aren't just talking to the journalist, but you are talking through them to people who presumably are fans of the Rolling Stones. The interviews give you a chance to say a few things and maybe clear up some of the things people read about the band.

You don't have to bathe every day to look clean. It's just an illusion.

Boys were a very essential part of rock & roll. The girls were more onlookers.

Everyone knows what their roots are, but you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky too.