Keith Richards Quotes

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

Rock n Roll is music from the neck down. ~ Keith Richards

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

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

It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year. ~ Randy Bachman

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

Anything you throw yourself into, you better get yourself out of. ~ Keith Richards

I think I might have a bad psychic advisor. When I asked her to contact the dead, she gave me Keith Richards' phone number. ~ David Letterman

If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted
elegantly. ~ Keith Richards

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

I'm more old school: I want to be like Keith Richards on stage. It's not interesting to see straight-from-runway clothes slapped on an artist. It's more interesting when you see people who have their own style. ~ Lykke Li

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

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

But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their own music, clothes, and point(s) of view. It's sad and fraudulent that the kind of wholesale worship of some historical way of life has settled over so many young people, infecting them like a noxious gas ... I love the dead
grew up in the thrall of Shakespeare and Hank Williams and James Dean. And I adore the Rolling Stones. But there's a difference between cherishing "Satisfaction" and wearing Keith Richards' hair while doing Keith Richards' drugs. I don't want to be Keith Richards. I wanna be me. Not
like the neo-Deadheads
just another extra in an overblown costume drama about something that wasn't that interesting the first time around. ~ Sarah Vowell

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. ~ Keith Richards

I'm militantly anti-drug abuse but love everything Keith Richards and some other drug goofballs do. ~ Ted Nugent

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

Memory is fiction, ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

I'm glad I've given up drugs and alcohol. It would be awful to be like Keith Richards. He's pathetic. It's like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go onstage and look young. ~ Elton John

I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere. ~ Keith Richards

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

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

I only get ill when I give up drugs. ~ Keith Richards

The Stones in a club is still the ultimate rush. ~ Keith Richards

The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn't sure if he counted as a human being. ~ Daryl Gregory

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

Keith Richards ... was once asked how he came up with all those amazing guitar riffs. His answer? He just starts playing until he makes the right mistake. In other words he's optimistic he will create something good by virtue of getting something "wrong." ~ Mark Stevenson

I've been blessed. I grew up and played and worked and created with the Freddie Mercury, the Jimi Hendrix, the Keith Richards, the John Paul Jones of my generation. ~ Steven Adler

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. ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

I pull a lot of the stuff that I play off the rhythm tracks - and Keith Richards has been one of the main contributors to my inspirational playing. ~ Bobby Keys

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

Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if - given the chance to do it all over again - he'd start taking heroin, he doesn't pause. Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there - you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you're not going to find if you don't go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they're asleep. There's songs zooming around everywhere. There's songs zooming through here right now, in the air. ~ Caitlin Moran

I was husband for a week. Changed the baby's diapers. There's somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn't even know i wiped his ass ~ Keith Richards

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

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

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!" ~ Keith Richards

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence. ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon's Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights). ~ Austin Grossman

I know Mick Jagger wouldn't tour without Keith Richards and call it the Rolling Stones. ~ Richie Sambora

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

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

I don't regret nuthin... ~ Keith Richards

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 ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

Well, I'm not putting death on the agenda," he told the Times. "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. ~ Keith Richards

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

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

I'm not getting old I'm evolving. ~ Keith Richards

The Beatles were basically a vocal band. ~ Keith Richards

There are famous examples of people who just had really strange ways - [Jimi] Hendrix being the biggest example of that. Or someone like Keith Richards, he just has a really idiosyncratic style. ~ Bryce Dessner

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards. ~ Keith Richards

I'd like to be in a man band, but with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Keith Richards. We'd have a rocky edge. ~ Ringo Starr

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

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

Some musicians I know are incredible fathers. Like Keith Richards. A fantastic dad. ~ Jack Bruce

The silence was suddenly too much. He hit the CD button on the car's radio. Brian Jones's sitar riff opened for Charlie Watts tribal-like drumbeat thundering from the speakers. Keith Richards' jangly guitar joined in, followed by Mick singing about seeing a red door that he wanted to paint black. ~ Glenn Rolfe

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

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

Keith Richards I remember. There was a horse backstage that week, and I was in my dressing area and I saw Keith Richards go up, hold the horse's face in his hands, and go, "You're a fine horse, aren't you?" I'll never forget that. ~ Tom Shales

…goodness is ours to dispense. It's a currency that each of us gets to invent and denominate. David's had pictures of Chopin and Keith Richards on it. Mine had my dog. ~ Sue Halpern

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

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 ~ Keith Richards

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

He was tall and scrawny with a face that could be mistaken with Keith Richards on a bad day. ~ Kelley Armstrong

I have no idea what the audience makes of me. ~ Keith Richards

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. ~ Jerry Stahl

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

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

I don't know, but I always loved that image of a girl putting toenail polish on a guy - her boyfriend, or something like that. Or a guy waking up in the morning and reaching over and putting on his girlfriend's shirt. Like Keith Richards putting on one of Anita Pallenberg's blouses, or Courtney Love putting nail polish on Kurt Cobain. ~ Marc Jacobs

It's good to be anywhere. ~ Keith Richards

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

We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals. ~ Keith Richards

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke. ~ Iggy Pop

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

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. ~ Keith Richards

One night all the James Brown band was playing on stage and I look in the back and I could see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards trying to get in the club and they couldn't get in cause it was to crowded. ~ Tommy Chong

It was way out in the woods in a beautiful, huge log studio. Keith Richards came in and did the vocals with Levon. Again, a big party, but we did get a good cut out of it. ~ Scotty Moore