Keith Richards Quotes

It made me sick - my name's Keith Richards. It hardly makes it against Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, does it? On my first guitar I had Boy Blue written - just pathetic. But that was as good as I got at the time.

Treat each guitar track-and each song-completely different. For example, if I'm using a certain amp and guitar on one track, I'll deliberately use something else for the next tune or overdub.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

We do what we want to do. We write songs. We try not to repeat ourselves too much. We have our own sound and our own way of doing things. Up until now it has always been enjoyable. None of the members have ever got to the point where they don't want to be involved in it ... It's not entirely possible for me to stand back and look at the Rolling Stones because being a part of it you can't. I wish that I could just sit in the audience for one night and see the show. Everyone in the band has said that at some point. But then you wouldn't be seeing the whole band. And that's the problem with that.

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

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

The Beatles were basically a vocal band.

I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere.

I can't imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it's better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It's better than starving to death. But you don't want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it's going to calm down. It's going to be the longest three days you've spent in your life, and you wonder why you're doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don't know. I still don't know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can't stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you're throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit's coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that's when a reasonable man says, "I'm hooked." But even that doesn't stop a reasonable man from going back on it.

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

I don't regret nuthin...

The big rules of knife fighting are (a) do not try it at home, and (b) the whole point is never, ever use the blade. It is there to distract your opponent. While he stares at the gleaming steel, you kick his balls to kingdom come
he's all yours. Just a tip!

I have no idea what the audience makes of me.

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

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.

The only new technology that interests me is when it sort of throws me back soundwise. And I can think, "Wow, that means I can go onstage and sound like Scotty Moore now and again!"

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

We've got the sound and we know we can find it one way or another if we've got the song - we'll chase the damn thing all around the room, up to the ceiling. We know we've got it and we'll lock on to it and find it.

Memory is fiction,

You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.

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

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.

We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

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

I firmly believe if you want to be a guitar player, you better start on acoustic and then graduate to electric. Don't think you're going to be Townshend or Hendrix just because you can go wee wee wah wah, and all the electronic tricks of the trade. First you've got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there's no babe around, you sleep with it. She's just the right shape.

Before Elvis, everything was in black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious Technicolor.

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.

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

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

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

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.

That was the biggest fear. I'd rather clean up before I went on the road. It's bad enough cleaning up by yourself, but the idea of putting the whole tour on the line because I could'n make it was too much; even for me

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I've been through more cold turkeys than there are freezers.

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.

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

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

Its called a playground, but its nearer to a battlefield. It can be brutal

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 Stones in a club is still the ultimate rush.

Wild Horses" started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn't play minor chords, "fucking Chinese music.

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.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

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

Rock n Roll is music from the neck down.

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.

Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point you can bear. It's impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.

We're both pretty lousy, but together we are better than ten others.

I'm not getting old I'm evolving.

From the 12th Congressional District Hopeful William Jefferson Clinton during the Nixon investigations.
I wanted to share some information I've turned up regarding two of your Clinton quotes.

When you're supported by millions all over the world, you can either go nuts, or try to feed off the goodwill.

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

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

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.

All the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.

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

When I started, all I wanted to do was play like Chuck (Berry)

Mick's album was called She's the Boss, which said it all. I've never listened to the entire thing all the way through. Who has? It's like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.

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

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.

Of the best things that happened to me at that time, believe it or not, was joining the Boy Scouts. Its leader, Baden-Powell, a genuinely nice man who was well tuned in to what small boys liked doing, did believe that without the scouts the empire would collapse. This

A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it's an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.

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 encourage anybody to do what I do, you know? Why should you? More for me!

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

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

To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart," Richards notes, "is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart." Keith Richards from his autobiography

I only get ill when I give up drugs.

To me, as long as we've known each other, I've always thought Mick's most brilliant thing was that he could work in an area two foot square and give a very exciting performance.

A familiar Gusism was to greet a friend with 'Hello, don't be a cunt all your life.

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..

My life is full of broken halos.

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 like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?

I don't have a problem with drugs, I have a problem with policemen.

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

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.

It's really good to be here and as I always say, it's really good to be anywhere!

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

Songwriting's a weird game. I never intended to become one - I fell into this by mistake, and I can't get out of it. It fascinates me. I like to point out the rawer points of life.

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.

And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty.

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

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

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