1. A good thing never ends. 2. Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.
3. Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.
4. Thank you for leaving us alone but giving us enough attention to boost our egos.
5. The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.
6. People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.
7. I got nasty habits; I take tea at three.
8. I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs.
9. My secrets must be poetic to be believable.
11. I can't get no satisfaction.
12. The elusive nature of love...it can be such a fleeting thing. You see it there and it's just fluttering and it's gone.
13. The Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has just published the story of her life. I confess that it is not in my reading table.
14. You wake up in the morning and you look at your old spoon, and you say to yourself: "Mick, it's time to get yourself a new spoon." And you do.
16. I haven't had the time to plan returning to the scene because I haven't left it.
17. People think they know you. They know the things about you that you have forgotten.
18. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
19. As long as my face is on page one, I don't care what they say about me on page seventeen.
21. I believe we should encourage children to sing and play instruments from an early age.
22. I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be too involved with what you have done.
23. I have never wanted to give up performing on stage, but one day the tours will be over.
24. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, but how boring is that?
25. I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson. I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way.
27. I've managed to avoid tattoos so far.
28. It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
29. My mother has always been unhappy with what I do. She would rather I do something nicer, like be a bricklayer.
30. Patriotism is an instant reaction that fades away when the war starts.
31. People get very thoughtful when they are in cars. I no longer care for cars. I don't collect them.
33. People love talking about when they were young and heard Honky Tonk Women for the first time. It's quite a heavy load to carry on your shoulders, the memories of so many people.
34. I don't believe in having bands for solo records.
35. I took her for granted…I played with her mind. I think I've just made the biggest mistake of my life.
36. I'm very different from Keith.
37. That's my ambition. But I've been doing so much working out and all that dancing.
39. As a band, we're playing together better than we ever have…And we're really proud of (title of new album/greatest-hits package with one new song), so while we know people like to hear the old ones, we hope they also dig the new stuff.
40. I think you're always prepared to listen to peoples' points of view, but when they're not working you've got to speak up as well. I think social comment is very much part of what the Rolling Stones have always done.
41. Of course, you are as vulnerable as anyone else.
42. We haven't been here much, if that isn't an understatement…We've added a few more songs since then.
43. You call yourself a Christian; I call you a hypocrite. You call yourself a patriot; well, I think you're full of…
45. I think he put the box down and opened the folded paper. He said: "Ah, ah," we won't have to look much further.
46. He twice asked me how much it was worth. He then said "a thousand," but I never replied.
47. He said: "Don't worry about it Mick, we can sort it all out." I said: "No, we can't." He said: "Come on, how much is it worth to you?" He seemed to want me to name a figure but I did not want to…
48. It is not really aimed at anyone. It's not aimed, personally aimed, at President Bush. It wouldn't be called Sweet Neo Con if it was.
50. It's great to be back here in Boston.
51. How come you're so wrong? My sweet neo-con, where's the money gone, in the Pentagon.
52. I think he's a bit worried because he lives in the US.
53. I should think that being my old lady would be all the satisfaction or career any woman needs.
54. Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.
55. He was a unique artist... an original in an area of imitators. (about Elvis Presley)
56. All dancing is a replacement for sex.
58. It's kind of limiting using your intellect to write songs like Brown Sugar, isn't it? The only thing I'm really interested in is comparative religion and ancient history.
60. We belong to a generation that's separate from any other. We believe in what we're doing. We're happy to have the kids screaming for us. It gets me down to think that a lot of them will one day disappear into the drab nest. I hope all of them won't. If only the whole world could stay young.
61. Everybody has their own moral code. I conduct myself as I think fit.
63. OK, that was a very big break, the '60s thing. But it was winding up from the days of Elvis. The Elvis period was super-rebellious. Because that kind of music was much more shocking than the music of the Beatles - the early Beatles…The sexuality of the early Elvis years was much more shocking to a straight audience than the Beatles "I Want to Hold Your Hand"…The wild men - Elvis, Jerry Lee - they were much more scary. So when we're talking about any '60s break, you have to take that into account. They'd already made this sexual charge.
65. The '50s were the beginnings of a consumer revolution. A few books like Absolute Beginners give a reasonably accurate flavor of the period if you weren't there or can't quite remember; I was very young.
67. We(Keith and Mick) have a very good relationship at the moment. But it's a different relationship to what we had when we were 5 and different to what we had when we were 20 and a different relationship than when we were 30. We see each other every day, talk to each other every day, play every day. But it's not the same as when we were 20 and shared rooms.
68. I think a lot of young people have started something and we're never going to finish it. I think maybe kids went too far in their faith in it. They expected it to be everything, to express all they feel and do.
70. I'm not on anyone's side. There is no side that has an absolute answer. That's the trouble with politics. You might say, The Republican take on the Middle East is incorrect. The Democratic policy wasn't that brilliant, either.
71. I've always been spiritual. I wish it had been developed in some other way, but I think in our culture it rarely is. This is as far as we get.
72. I think, like most people, my moral values tend to be pretty fuzzy.
74. The Beatles were so big that it's hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were. There isn't a real comparison with anyone now.
76. If we were bored to death, honestly I don't think we would do it. We do enjoy ourselves doing it. Everyone has been saying: "How come they can enjoy themselves? They should be bored to death doing this." We're still having a lot of fun.
77. There's not a lot in rock that is new. It's the same kind of chord sequences and the same kind of rhythm references and the same recycling of subject matter. But I don't think it's a problem. I mean, traditional musical forms like folk music in three chords or blues are endearing to Americans. They find some comfort in them.
80. I'll be keeping it up until my body starts to fall apart and that's a long time off. The Stones might not last for ever but we'll be going until sometime this side of ever.
83. (W)e shall never tour America again. It is very hard work and one bring-down after another. Every place you go there is a barrage of criticism and eventually you just start lashing out.
86. It's an overwhelming feeling, the audience. That must be why most of these people never give up performing. Because they just can't go without that sort of rush. It's a bit like having an orgasm. Sometimes an orgasm is better than being onstage; sometimes being onstage is better than an orgasm.
88. I think it's very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don't talk about. That's why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits…It's wearing. You're on all the time. As much as I love talking to you today, I'd rather be having one day where I don't have to think about me. With all this attention, you become a child. It's awful to be the center of attention. You can't talk about anything apart from your own experience, your own dopey life. I'd rather do something that can get me out of the center of attention. It's very dangerous. But there's no way, really, to avoid that.
90. A knighthood, I'd take, nothing less than a knighthood. But you gotta last a long time to get a knighthood.
92. We knew (the Beatles) by then and we were rehearsing and Andrew brought Paul and John down to the rehearsal. They said they had this tune, they were really hustlers then. I mean the way they used to hustle tunes was great: Hey Mick, we've got this great song. So they played "I Wanna Be Your Man" and we thought it sounded pretty commercial, which is what we were looking for, so we did it like Elmore James or something. I haven't heard it for ages but it must be pretty freaky 'cause nobody really produced it…It was completely crackers, but it was a hit and sounded great onstage.
94. People get very blasé about their big hit. Satisfaction was the song that really made the Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren't American, and America was a big thing and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing.
96. Satanic Majesties had interesting things on it, but I don't think any of the songs are very good. It's a bit like Between The Buttons. It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There's 2 good songs on it: She's A Rainbow, and 2000 Light Years from Home. The rest of them are nonsense…I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it. The whole thing we were on acid.
99. Vietnam has changed America. It has divided and made people think. There's a lot of opposition - much more than you think, because all the opposition is laughed at in American magazines. It's made to look ridiculous. But there is real opposition. Before, Americans used to accept everything, my country right or wrong. But now a lot of people are saying my country should be right, not wrong.
101. I'm very country-influenced, from quite young. Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, George Jones, so on. I heard those people, really, before I heard blues. Even Jim Reeves, Everly Brothers, and so on. Those kind of pop-country performers are very popular in England. Used to come along and play a lot on TV and their records would be around.
103. A lot of children, like in the United States, don't remember the real horror of (World War II), because they never had to, as they do in Europe and Russia and so on. I'm not saying America didn't have a terrible experience, but it never came home to them that way. You had rationing and shortages, and people got killed and coffins came home. But you didn't have the experience of the block opposite being destroyed when you got up in the morning.
106. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.
107. Life's just a cocktail party - on the street.
109. The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.
110. When I'm 33, I quit.
111. Dandelions don't tell no lies…
What do you think of Mick Jagger's quotes?
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