“I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.”

I’m free of hypochondria– although I’ve got everything else.

Everybody’s got a different way of telling a story – and has different stories to tell.

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.

I’ve never turned blue in someone else’s bathroom. I consider that the height of bad manners.

If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they’re asleep.

I have no idea what the audience makes of me.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

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. Otherwise, have a good time.

Some things get better with age. Like me.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

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

I only get ill when I give up drugs. I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.

We age not by holding on to youth, but by letting ourselves grow and embracing whatever youthful parts remain.

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.

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

I look for ambiguity when I’m writing because life is ambiguous.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

I’m never tired of going to the studio. I enjoy recording and documenting everything and trying new things.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.

I remember singing around the house to records that were playing. All kinds of music. And the great James Cleveland was often in our house, and I grew up with his sound as well.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.