Top 120 Keith Richards Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Music works in mysterious ways. Once it goes in you have no idea what it can do to you.”

— Keith Richards

103. “Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money.”

— Keith Richards

104. “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

105. “I’ve always been suspicious of TV, I’ve always found music and video to be an unhappy marriage.”

— Keith Richards

106. “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

107. “There’s no substitute for live work to keep a band together.”

— Keith Richards

108. “The Beatles were basically a vocal band.”

— Keith Richards

109. “Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can’t do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.”

— Keith Richards

110. “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

111. “You didn’t know whether Chuck Berry was black or white – it was not a concern.”

— Keith Richards

112. “It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.”

— Keith Richards

113. “Its called a playground, but its nearer to a battlefield. It can be brutal.”

— Keith Richards

114. “I occasionally borrow pot from my kids. They do a little weed occasionally. ‘Here, Dad’ – or more likely, ‘Dad, have you got any?’”

— Keith Richards

115. “You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.”

— Keith Richards

116. “Treat each guitar track-and each song-completely different. For example, if I’m using a certain amp and guitar on one track, I’ll deliberately use something else for the next tune or overdub.”

— Keith Richards

117. “I have no idea what the audience makes of me.”

— Keith Richards

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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.”

— Keith Richards

122. “When you’re supported by millions all over the world, you can either go nuts, or try to feed off the goodwill.”

— Keith Richards

123. “You don’t start to play your guitar thinking you’re going to be running an organisation that will maybe generate millions.”

— Keith Richards

124. “You get onstage and make other people feel happy. Make them feel good.”

— Keith Richards

125. “Everything they’d been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.”

— Keith Richards

126. “One of the great things about songwrighting; it’s not an intellectual experience.”

— Keith Richards

127. “Charlie Watts’s drums on “Street Fighting Man” are from this little 1930s practice drummer’s kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that’s really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.”

— Keith Richards

128. “To me, as long as we’ve known each other, I’ve always thought Mick’s most brilliant thing was that he could work in an area two foot square and give a very exciting performance.”

— Keith Richards

129. “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.”

— Keith Richards

130. “You’re always learning about this thing everytime you pick it up.”

— Keith Richards

131. “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

132. “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

133. “To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.”

— Keith Richards