Keith Richards
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.Collection: Heart
Some of my most outrageous nights- I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I'm famous for partying! The ultimate party- if it's any good- you can't remember it.Collection: Party
To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.Collection: Silence
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.Collection: Music
When you're 20, you can't imagine being 30. When you're 30, you can't imagine being 40. When you're 40, you can't imagine being 100.Collection: Imagine
I like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?Collection: Austin
My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.Collection: Father
I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.Collection: Silly
But I've always felt very comfortable on stage, even if I screw up. It always felt like a dog, this is my turf, piss around it. While I'm here, nothing else can happen. All I can do is screw up. Otherwise, have a good time.Collection: Dog
There's a demon in me, and he's still around. Without the dope, we have a bit more of a chat these days.Collection: Dope
I haven't stopped smoking...anythingCollection: Smoking
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.Collection: Song
I don't encourage anybody to do what I do, you know? Why should you? More for me!Collection: Should
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.Collection: Beautiful
What is life but playing with time?Collection: What Is Life
Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.Collection: Want
My life is full of broken halos.Collection: Broken
If you're cool, you don't know nothing about it. It just is, or you ain't.Collection: Knows
You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Rocks
I never sleep alone. If there is no one to sleep next to, I'll sleep next to a stuffed animal. It makes me feel secure and safe. It's a little embarrassing to admit it; I'm an old man now. It's important to me though.Collection: Sleep
To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That's the reason I'm still alive.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Growing Up
Music works in mysterious ways. Once it goes in you have no idea what it can do to you.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Running
The public library is the great equaliser.Collection: Library
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.Collection: Matter
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.Collection: Bullying
Guitar is easy, all it takes is 5 fingers, 6 strings and 1 a**holeCollection: Guitar
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.Collection: Teamwork
It might appear that nothing is happening, but that's actually when it really happens.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Jobs
To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you.Collection: Animal
Fame has killed more very talented guys than drugs. Jimi Hendrix didn't die of an overdose, he died of fame.Collection: Guy
[joking about the length of the Rolling Stones' career] You have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe - and you have the Rolling Stones!Collection: Moon
When I started, all I wanted to do was play like Chuck (Berry)Collection: Play
Art is the last thing I'm worried about when I'm writing a song. As far as I'm concerned, art is just short for 'Arthur.'Collection: Song
It's basically against the whole idea of what always made rock&roll music interesting to me. I thought it was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expressions of rebellion. It was one channel you could take without havin' to kiss ass, you know? And right now it just seems like they're on a big daisy chain, each kissin' each other's asses.Collection: Kissing
Rock n Roll is music from the neck down.Collection: Rocks
I can sustain the impetus over the long tours we do is by feeding off the energy that we get back from an audience. That's my fuel. All i've got is this burning energy, especially when i've got a guitar in my hands.Collection: Guitar
Everything they’d been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.Collection: Rocks
I don't think rock n' roll songwriters should worry about art. I don't think it comes into it...as far as I'm concerned, Art is just short for Arthur.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Boys
I don't have a problem with drugs, I have a problem with policemen.Collection: Drug
If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Music
I wouldn't warm to [Chuck Berry] even if I was cremated next to him.Collection: Berries