Keith Richards famous quotes

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
-- Keith Richards

#Growing Up #Two #Church

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

#Mean #Technology #Thinking

I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.
-- Keith Richards

#Silly #Way #Laboratory

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

#Song #Giving Up #Believe

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

#Emotion #Language #Speak

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

#Jobs #Ideas #Musician

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
-- Keith Richards

#Rocks #Guitar #Rock And Roll

I like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?
-- Keith Richards

#Austin #Rooms

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

#Rocks #Problem #Forget

I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.
-- Keith Richards

#Music #Alcohol #Drug

You don't find a style. A style finds you
-- Keith Richards

#Style

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

#Rocks #Easy

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

#Beautiful #Song #Reading

I'm an unpure purist, something like that.
-- Keith Richards

It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.
-- Keith Richards

#Song #Play #Water

If you've gotta think about being cool, you ain't cool.
-- Keith Richards

#Thinking #Being Cool

I only get ill when I give up drugs
-- Keith Richards

#Giving Up #Giving #Drug

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

#Brutal #Playgrounds

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

#Drug #Police #Problem

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

#Rocks #Rock And Roll #Necks

A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.
-- Keith Richards

#Silence #Musician #Paper

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

#Intellectual #Great Things

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

#Imagine

Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great ***** friends, but that's not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's 'can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you?' Friendship is the diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world.
-- Keith Richards

#Distance #People #Guy

The public library is the great equaliser.
-- Keith Richards

#Library #Public Library

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

#Clubs #Stones #Stills

Songwriting's a weird game.
-- Keith Richards

#Games #Songwriting

We age not by holding on to youth, but by letting ourselves grow and embracing whatever youthful parts remain.
-- Keith Richards

#Age #Youth #Holding On

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

#Rocks #Rock And Roll #Jazz

I'm all for a quiet life. I just didn't get one.
-- Keith Richards

#Quiet

I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere.
-- Keith Richards

#Music #Mean #Piano

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.
-- Keith Richards

#Beautiful #Looks #Complication

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

#Writing #Looks #Life Is

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.
-- Keith Richards

#Teamwork #Rock And Roll #Rocks

I never thought I was wasted, but I probably was.
-- Keith Richards

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.
-- Keith Richards

#Mean #Doctors #Funeral

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

#Feet #Teeth #Use

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

#Running #Song #Taken

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

#Rocks #Textbooks #Rock N Roll

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

#Heart #Thinking #Guy

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

#Men #Doors #Police

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

#Wire #Tape #Done

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

#Air #Water #Next

You have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe - and you have the Rolling Stones!
-- Keith Richards

#Moon #Air #Rolling

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

#Two #Presidential #Hopeful