“I don’t wave a flag for anything. I’m a musician.”

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.

A painter’s got a canvas. The writer’s got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.

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

I am not doing it just for the money or for you. I am doing it for me.

If you’re cool, you don’t know nothing about it. It just is, or you ain’t.

When you’re 20, you can’t imagine being 30. When you’re 30, you can’t imagine being 40. When you’re 40, you can’t imagine being 100.

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do.

I’m not getting old I’m evolving.

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.

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

You can beg them for mercy, wave the white flag of surrender, but the only true elixir for the vitriol they bestow is a measure of hatred dispensed of your own.

Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.

A symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change.

I don’t want the news to be patriotic. I don’t want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don’t want any of that.

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.

The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments – a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared.

The American flag has not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.