288 Quotes by Keith Richards

You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.

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.

Let me be clear about this. I don’t have a drug problem. I have a police problem.

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.

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.

A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it’s an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.

I only get ill when I give up drugs.

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.

To make a rock’n’roll record, technology is the least important thing.