Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by Keith Richards - Page 3

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 father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.

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

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.

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!

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

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

If you're gonna get wasted, get wasted elegantly.

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.'

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 don't wave a flag for anything. I'm a musician.

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.

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

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.

No broken hearts, no broken necks.

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

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 occasionally borrow pot from my kids. They do a little weed occasionally. 'Here, Dad' — or more likely, 'Dad, have you got any?'

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

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It's the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: 'He passed it on.'

Rock n Roll is music from the neck down.

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

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.

Rap - so many words, so little said.

One minute I'm standing at Ronnie Scott's getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I'm on a marble slab

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!"

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.

If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep.

I don't know if people in New York recognize me or not. I'm not really conscious of it. If somebody stops me, then I suddenly realize that people are looking at me, but other times they may be doing it and I don't even know because I'm engrossed in something else.

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.

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

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

I'd play whenever I could get my hands on an electric guitar; I was trying to pick up rock'n'roll riffs and electric blues - the latest Muddy Waters. I'd spend hours and hours on the same track, back again, and back again.

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

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.