Top 100 Keith Richards Quotes
#1. To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you.
Keith Richards
#3. I don't have a problem with drugs, I have a problem with policemen.
Keith Richards
#4. Whatever side I take, I know well that I will be
blamed.
Keith Richards
#5. 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
#6. Great songs write themselves. You're just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just follow it where it takes you.
Keith Richards
#9. Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.
Keith Richards
#10. You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.
Keith Richards
#11. And it was a very, very fruitful and great relationship between the Stones and The Beatles. It was very, very friendly.
Keith Richards
#12. Love has sold more songs than you've had hot dinners.
Keith Richards
#13. [John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.
Keith Richards
#14. This is the rock 'n' roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.
Keith Richards
#15. You don't start to play your guitar thinking you're going to be running an organisation that will maybe generate millions.
Keith Richards
#16. Why would you want to be anything else if you're Mick Jagger?
Keith Richards
#18. If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted
elegantly.
Keith Richards
#20. To make a rock'n'roll record, technology is the least important thing.
Keith Richards
#21. We're both pretty lousy, but together we are better than ten others.
Keith Richards
#22. I've never turned blue in someone else's
bathroom. I consider that the height of bad
manners.
Keith Richards
#23. I've never tried to achieve anything. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.
Keith Richards
#24. 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.
Keith Richards
#25. If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
Keith Richards
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Keith Richards
#28. All the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.
Keith Richards
#29. One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience
Keith Richards
#30. 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.
Keith Richards
#31. 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
Keith Richards
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Keith Richards
#34. 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.
Keith Richards
#35. 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
#37. I've never had my hair cut by anybody, I do it all myself.
Keith Richards
#38. I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.
Keith Richards
#39. You get onstage and make other people feel happy. Make them feel good.
Keith Richards
#40. I've always been suspicious of TV, I've always found music and video to be an unhappy marriage.
Keith Richards
#42. 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
#43. We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.
Keith Richards
#44. To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.
Keith Richards
#45. My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.
Keith Richards
#46. You've got the sun, you've got the moon, and you've got the Rolling Stones.
Keith Richards
#47. Retire? I can't spell the word. I'd play in a wheelchair.
Keith Richards
#48. 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.'
Keith Richards
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Music works in mysterious ways. Once it goes in you have no idea what it can do to you.
Keith Richards
#53. You have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe - and you have the Rolling Stones!
Keith Richards
#54. 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.
Keith Richards
#55. 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
#56. I wouldn't warm to [Chuck Berry] even if I was cremated next to him.
Keith Richards
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Keith Richards
#60. I've been through more cold turkeys than there are freezers.
Keith Richards
#61. I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused.
Keith Richards
#62. It might appear that nothing is happening, but that's actually when it really happens.
Keith Richards
#63. Let me be clear about this. I don't have a drug problem. I have a police problem.
Keith Richards
#64. Before Elvis, everything was in black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious Technicolor.
Keith Richards
#65. I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.
Keith Richards
#66. 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.
Keith Richards
#67. It's really good to be here and as I always say, it's really good to be anywhere!
Keith Richards
#68. You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.
Keith Richards
#69. Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.
Keith Richards
#71. To me, my biggest fear is getting a big head, and that is when I get the hammer. Because it's very easy in this game to believe you're something special.
Keith Richards
#72. 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.
Keith Richards
#73. One minute I'm standing at Ronnie Scott's getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I'm on a marble slab
Keith Richards
#75. The electric guitar was vital in helping what I've achieved where would I be without it? Playing awfully quietly, for a start.
Keith Richards
#76. 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
#77. Hey, we just enjoy it. I think we think we're getting the hang of this thing, you know?
Keith Richards
#78. We bought Candy Twirls and Bull's-Eyes and Licorice & Blackcurrant. We weren't going to lower ourselves and score at the supermarket, were we?
Keith Richards
#79. Some people think I'm a mythical genius, others think I'm a junkie madman.
Keith Richards
#80. But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: Do you know this feeling?
Keith Richards
#81. 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.
Keith Richards
#82. 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!
Keith Richards
#83. 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
#84. There's no substitute for live work to keep a band together.
Keith Richards
#85. 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.
Keith Richards
#86. 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.
Keith Richards
#87. 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
#88. Yes, I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.
Keith Richards
#89. 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
#90. We age not by holding on to youth, but by letting ourselves grow and embracing whatever youthful parts remain.
Keith Richards
#91. True friends. Hardest thing to find, but you never look for them - they found you ; you just grow into each other
Keith Richards
#92. 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
#93. If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they're asleep.
Keith Richards
#94. I've got nothing against daylight. I don't live totally nocturnally. Only when I feel like it. Which is most of the time.
Keith Richards
#96. 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
#97. If you're cool, you don't know nothing about it. It just is, or you ain't.
Keith Richards
#98. You're always learning about this thing everytime you pick it up
Keith Richards
#99. About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.
Keith Richards
#100. Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money
Keith Richards
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
