Quotes from Keith Richards

I was husband for a week. Changed the baby's diapers. There's somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn't even know i wiped his ass

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.

And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty.

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

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

You know, life's a funny thing. Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

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.

I've been through more cold turkeys than there are freezers.

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?

La gente me pregunta "por qué no lo dejas?". El hecho es que no me puedo retirar hasta que no estire la pata. Creo que no acaban de entender lo que gano con todo esto. No lo hago sólo por el dinero ni por ti. Lo hago por mi.

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.

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

A familiar Gusism was to greet a friend with 'Hello, don't be a cunt all yer life.

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.

Wild Horses" started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn't play minor chords, "fucking Chinese music.

We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

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. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you've been to a special place.

The addiction was all about looking for oblivion, for forgetting, the contortions we go through just enough to be ourselves for a few hours.

El silencio es el lienzo en blanco, el marco, sobre lo que trabajas; y no tratas de ahogarlo.

There is no such thing as a rock-and-roll venue; there's not one in the world that's made to play this kind of music as an ideal form.

Songs are strange things. Little notes like that. If they stick, they stick. With most of the songs I've ever written, quite honestly, I've felt there's an enormous gap here, waiting to be filled; this song should have been written hundred of years ago. How did nobody pick up on that little space? Half the time you're looking for gaps that other people haven't done.

No, there wasn't a lot of fun for a while with Anita in the middle '70s. She became unbearable. She was a real bitch to me, a bitch to Marlon, she was a bitch to herself. And she knows it, and I'm writing it here in this book.

They'd call us girls because of the long hair. "How you doing, girls? Dance with me?" Hair… the little things that you wouldn't think about that changed whole cultures. The way they reacted to our looks in certain parts of London then was not much different from the way they reacted to us in the South. "Hello, darling," and all that shit.

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.