Keith Richards Quotes

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

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 don't regret nuthin.

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

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.

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

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

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

It's called the mysterious rhythm of life, ... I can't quite account for it. It's probably an addiction, quite honestly. I need that shot of stage every two or three years.

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

My life is full of broken halos.

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

Well, I'm not putting death on the agenda. I don't want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet. He's the guy I'm gonna see, isn't it? I'm not going to the Other Place, let's face it.

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

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

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.

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.

Love has sold more songs than you've had hot dinners.

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

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

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

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

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

I wouldn't warm to [Chuck Berry] even if I was cremated next to him.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Everything they’d been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.

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.

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

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.

And it was a very, very fruitful and great relationship between the Stones and The Beatles. It was very, very friendly.

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.

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

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.

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

The electric guitar meant that you could have a band with a drummer and a couple of guitars. And that put a lot of horn players out of work.

I'm an unpure purist, something like that.

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

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.

There's no substitute for live work to keep a band together.

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.

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

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. . .When it works, baby, you've got wings.

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

I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.