Quotes from Keith Richards

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

When you've got three thousand chicks in front of you that are ripping off their panties and throwing them at you, you realize what an awesome power you have unleashed.

And there is the offending line "Black girls just wanna get fucked all night" from "Some Girls." Well, we've been on the road with a lot of black chicks for many years, and there's quite a few that do. It could have been yellow girls or white girls.

The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they're in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The

We never realized just what the scale of this thing would become. How did it get so big when we're not doing anything much different than what we did in 1963 in the Crawdaddy Club? Our usual set list is two-thirds standard Stones numbers, the classics. The only thing that's different is the audiences have grown and the show's gotten longer.

How many times I've turned round behind the amplifiers and chucked up, you wouldn't believe! Mick pukes behind the stage. Ronnie pukes behind the stage too. Sometimes it's the conditions: not enough air, too much heat. Throwing up is not such a big deal.

And these weird little bunches of people would come in and support us. We didn't even know where they came from or why, or how they found out where we were.

San Antonio on June 3. This was the tour of the giant inflatable cock. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang "Starfucker." It was great was the cock, though we paid for it later in Mick's wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities.

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

You can't always get what you want But if you try sometimes, Well, You just might find you get what you need.

Cheltenham, admittedly, is a bit far-fetched. Blues players from Cheltenham, there ain't a lot. And we didn't want to make money. We despised money, we despised cleanliness, we just wanted to be black motherfuckers.

And from the earliest I always felt good on stage. You get nervous before you go up there before a lot of people, but to me the feeling was, let the tiger out the cage. Maybe that's just another version of butterflies. It could be. 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.

In 2006, the political ambitions of Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, who was going to stand in the primaries as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, extended to granting me a pardon for my misdemeanor of thirty years previous. Governor Huckabee also thinks of himself as a guitar player. I think he even has a band. In fact there was nothing to pardon. There was no crime on the slate in Fordyce, but that didn't matter, I got pardoned anyway.

His understanding of the DNA code in all bands is that sooner or later the two principals will turn on each other because one of them will be driven crazy by the knowledge that to be at their best they need to perform with the other person and therefore they need that other person to be successful, or even to be heard. It makes you hate that person.

He told me that because he was left-handed, he and John could play the guitars like mirrors opposite each other, watching each other's hands.

Chuck had to come up to Johnnie's mark. He'd been playing with slouches for years, with the cheapest band in town, just going in and out with a briefcase. To a musician, playing below your mark is soul destroying, and he had been doing that for ages, to the point where he was completely cynical about the music.

The lifeblood of good conspiracies is that you'll never find out; the lack of evidence keeps them fresh. No one's ever going to find out if I had my blood changed or not. The story is well beyond the reach of evidence or, if it never happened, my denials. But then, read on. I have stood back for many years from honestly addressing that burning topic.

When you sing lead in a band, it's an exhausting business. Just the breathing involved. Singing song after song is enough to knock most people on their ass. It's an incredible amount of oxygen you're going through. So we would do shows and we'd come off stage and I'd go to bed!

Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we're the closest of brothers, and that can't be severed.

But after a while, if you've got some musical ears, you pick up on the difference between Pat Boone's "Ain't That a Shame" and Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame." Not that Pat Boone's was particularly bad, he was a very good singer, but it was just so shallow

We're both pretty lousy, but together we are better than ten others.

I once had a mynah bird, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. When I put music on, it would start yelling at me. It was like living with an ancient, fractious aunt. The fucker was never grateful for anything.

Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel—whether it's "Jumpin' Jack" or "Satisfaction" or "All Down the Line"—when I realize I've hit the right tempo and the band's behind me. It's

People say, "Why don't you give it up?" I can't retire until I croak. I don't think they quite understand what I get out of this. I'm not doing it just for the money or for you. I'm doing it for me.