What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.