“The electric guitar was vital in helping what I’ve achieved where would I be without it? Playing awfully quietly, for a start.”

What is life but playing with time?

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

We all have our own personal laboratories. Life is an experiment, and it’s just a matter of getting the alchemical or chemical combination right.

If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use both feet.

I’m all for a quiet life. I just didn’t get one.

One minute I’m standing at Ronnie Scott’s getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I’m on a marble slab

It’s a privilege just to wake up to a new day.

It might appear that nothing is happening, but that’s actually when it really happens.

My life is full of broken halos.

There’s a demon in me, and he’s still around. Without the dope, we have a bit more of a chat these days.

I never plan anything, which is probably the difference between Mick and myself. Mick needs to know what he’s gonna do tomorrow and I’m just happy to wake up to see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock and I’m roll.

Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger?

I was number 1 on the who’s likely to die list for 10 years. I was really disappointed when I fell off that list.

My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.

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.

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

Water is more stimulating than wine. Fresh air is more intoxicating than cigarette smoke. Sunlight is more subtle than electric light.

Enthusiasm is the electric current that keeps the engine of life going at top speed. Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress.

The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the ‘Newton of Electricity’.

One of the chief peculiarities of this treatise is the doctrine that the true electric current, on which the electromagnetic phenomena depend, is not the same thing as the current of conduction, but that the time-variation of the electric displacement must [also] be taken into account.

We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD.

I’m trying to have a guitar built. What’s needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.