Top 193 Quotes & Sayings by Mick Jagger - Page 2

Americans shocked me by their behavior and their narrow-mindedness.

I'm not the businessman. I don't deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I've run out of money, I have to go and make some more.

You never really know what's going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they're going to behave.

I didn't have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, "Well, I can do this." And I liked doing it.

Rock 'n' roll and playing live is very addictive. But you have to really be careful, because you don't want to do it all the time. It's like when you are young and you think if you are not having sex you're wasting your time. But as you get older you realise everything has its place. It's the same thing with performing.... Performing is a great thing to do but you don't want to have to be doing it every night.

No one, but no one, is equal, or ever will be. Elvis was and is supreme.

Dandelions don't tell no lies.

I always think it's better to be not taking drugs or drinking or anything. That's not saying I've never done it because I have. But I sort of learned I think after a while there has been - it didn't take me that long to realize that it wasn't a good thing.

I don't know if rock is dying. I wouldn't want to say that, but the world does change. Nothing stays the same.

Anyone taking heroin is thinking about taking heroin more than they're thinking about anything else. That's the general rule about most drugs.

I think people are afraid to express their opinions half the time.

I, personally, have a lot of energy, so I don't see it as an immediate problem.

Well, don't we all feel like jumping to the end of the world sometimes?

I don't only like rock music. There are other forms of music that I find interesting. I would want to do everything, every kind of music. I wouldn't want to be limited to like playing heavy metal or whatever.

Lets drink to the hard working people Lets drink to the salt of the earth

Always as a musician you must have one thing you do well.

I love America, but I can't spend the whole year here. I can't afford the taxes.

Time is on my side, yes it is.

I don't want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn't bear to end up like Elvis Presley in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.

I don't want to be my extravert self all the time.

I'm very ambivalent in my feelings about marriage. I think it promises a lot to people... sort of like saying, once you get married you are on the highway to heaven, and quite often it isn't that. I think marriage has always been based on a combination of religious and legal reasons.

That's one of the good things about a lot of the young British bands, they are mixing all styles of music. I think that's very good because that's very now.

I should think that being my old lady would be all the satisfaction or career any woman needs.

People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it's self-sustaining.

If you're the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else.

I don't really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn't really worry me even if it's like out of place. At least it's relevant.

Any performer is one person privately and then he's another person when he steps on the stage.

Normally I am not so violent. Everything comes from the question: Where will I die? It is a strong concern.

I liked John a lot. He was the one I really got on with the most. We weren't buddy-buddies but we were always friendly. But after the Beatles and the Stones stopped playing clubs, we didn't see each other that much until he separated from Yoko, around 1974. We got really friendly again. And when he went back with Yoko, he went into hibernation ... when I went to visit someone in the Dakota, I'd leave him a note saying: 'I live next door: I know you don't want to see anyone, but if you do, please call.' He never did.

I don't think that being in a full-time relationship is necessarily for everybody all of the time. It's not necessarily some state of grace.

I think it's very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don't talk about. That's why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits.

You can't always get what you want.

It's not selling out, it is called making lots of money.

If you're really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.

I don't like being completely isolated. I need the energy from other people.

I like to have a peek, see what the audience is doing during the opening act, because it gives you a clue and gives you a good feeling of where you are - the air can be different in different places.

In England you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I'm tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.

Casanova, he had no money and no power, and according to some, he even was cute. But he had talent to live, and some literature talent. I love how he invented himself.

I have to get up the fitness level, sing a lot, practice, get in the mood, and generally do lots of rehearsal. Get your body and mind ready.

In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They've got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens.

He stole my music but he gave me my name.

I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

I don't want to be singing Satisfaction when I'm 40.

The music's rehearsed a lot. All people think about is, they think, in rock 'n' roll, they get the music off right and they think it's okay standing, looking macho. Well, it's not. That's boring. If you want to be a performer you've got to do a lot more work than that.

Of course, I do occasionally arouse primeval instincts, but I mean, most men can do that. They can't do it to so many. I just happen to be able to do it to several thousand people. It's fun to do that.

You don't have to bathe every day to look clean. It's just an illusion.

I prefer to live in a rented house. No ties. Nothing around my neck. Just the minimum kind of bare comforts of home.

If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.

You know, being in a rock band, you can't overdo the costume changes too much because everyone thinks, oh, that's not a real rock band. Look how many times he changes costumes. That's not rock. Rock's about going on in a T-shirt and staying in it and getting it all dirty. But that's not really my approach.

My father was furious with me, absolutely furious. I'm sure he wouldn't have been so mad if I'd have volunteered to join the army. Anything but this. He couldn't believe it. I agree with him: It wasn't a viable career opportunity.

Most people in England don't live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South.

There is something I like about talking to journalists that really goes beyond promotion because you aren't just talking to the journalist, but you are talking through them to people who presumably are fans of the Rolling Stones. The interviews give you a chance to say a few things and maybe clear up some of the things people read about the band.

I'm interested in feedback and learning what people want. It's a tricky thing for me when I do a set list. You get bored doing the same songs. Let's say we do one ballad in two hours, and it's "Wild Horses." If you say, I'm tired of that, let's try something less well known, and then you're out there stumbling through this song you just relearned at sound check, and you realize people probably want "Wild Horses" instead of this. You do need to do some songs that aren't so well known. The question is how many? I'm open to people posting their requests.

It's a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn't have gone on with it.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can't force them to like it.

You don't always do the same things you've done the night before. That's what makes playing live so interesting as opposed to being in the studio.

Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.