Creativity Quote by Keith Richards

Keith Richards is doing the most Richards thing imaginable here: deflating the myth while keeping the legend intact. For decades, the Stones’ aura has been welded to the idea of chemical ignition - that the riffs arrived on a smoke cloud, that chaos was the muse. He doesn’t exactly deny the chaos; he denies its credit. The line lands because it’s both modest and brazen: modest in refusing to romanticize addiction as artistry, brazen in implying the work was solid enough to survive whatever he threw at it.

The phrasing is slyly bureaucratic - “enhanced or impaired,” “didn’t have that much to do with it” - as if he’s filing a report on something the world treats like folklore. That tonal mismatch is the point. Richards yanks the conversation away from the easy headline (“drugs made genius”) and toward the unsexy reality of craft: repetition, muscle memory, taste, a band that knows how to lock in. Ten years of work aren’t a bender; they’re a practice.

The subtext is also defensive in a grown-up way. He’s refusing to offer a redemption narrative that flatters the audience’s appetite for morality plays. Instead, he asserts agency: the music wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t a cautionary tale either. In an era when rock culture sold self-destruction as authenticity, Richards retroactively edits the script - not to sanitize it, but to reclaim authorship from the mythology that profits off ruin.