Keith Richards Quotes

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

I tend to just do whatever I want on an album and try to make it work. I'm just adventurous. It's most exciting to be at the edge of your abilities. I want to see how far I can push things.

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before.

You just go for it and see what works. There are no rules.

Life isn't a science. We make it up as we go.

I try not to do anything by formula.

With 'Friday Night Lights,' we were encouraged to make it our own and improvise as much as we wanted.

I like to reinvent with each project, in any which way possible.

I improvise a lot and try something new every couple of years.

I'll do anything that sparks me. Sometimes I'll want to do something random with ballet, and then I'll want to be a hippie caterpillar in an animation film. Who knows what will come my way, but I'm going to try and put little hints into the universe, and hopefully they'll float on by.

I write songs as honestly as I can without worrying about genres or labels. Sometimes I sing, and sometimes I rap, and sometimes I do something in between. I jump around on stage and don't care too much about how I look. I try to be myself even though I'm still figuring myself out.

Some of my best songwriting choices started as mistakes or learning curves, when I accidentally hit a 'wrong' key or something. I try not to lose that the more I learn the how's and why's of piano.

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go.

In music you can find your own niche. You can do what you want to do. There is really no job description. You have to find your own way, and that's fun.

I became a singer and a songwriter by learning on the spot, so think I always need to be slightly out of my comfort zone when I do something. I've never stopped being experimental because that's how I started.

One thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds.

I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.

When you work with an actor and then you discover new things that are better, I think you gotta be free to be able to go with the new things that you're finding. I think that's very important. I have a strong idea when I go to shoot a movie but I also love to discover things when I'm on set as well.