“So many people are frightened to take a chance in life and there’s so many chances you have to take.”

My guitar style was developed during that 10-year period. That’s me. That’s the way I play, and I don’t wish to play any other way. Our own individual identities are firmly stamped on this album.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else – building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

I spend a lot of time near water.

Once I get onstage the tension explodes and I’m fine. I’m in another world – in a trance almost, doing what I love best, expressing myself through guitar.

I think it’s time to travel, start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world.

There’s a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term “genius,” but you’re treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers.

I’m not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That’ll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

If you’re working at the factory and you’re cursing every day that you get up, at all costs get out of it. You’ll just make yourself ill.

If you are on to something creative, school can also inhibit you. The wrong teacher, man, can really mess you up.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that’s what I wanted it to be.

I don’t deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

I’m just looking for an angel with a broken wing.

I can only listen to what I’m working on, at the time. I can’t listen to anything else because I don’t want to copy it.

There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They’re very, very precious to me.

I do really believe that all guitarists have a different character that comes through, that’s a strong character, the stronger the person is.

The term “genius” gets used far too loosely in rock & roll.

The veneration, wherewith Men are imbued for what they call Nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures of God. For many have not only look’d upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt.

Everybody counts, everybody deserves a chance, everybody has a responsible role to play and we all do better when we work together.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

God gave me life to continue to do things that I would never have done.

I hope you give yourself a try today.

There is always a chance to get even and I’m proud of the fact that for all the blows I always got back up again. That’s what makes me most content.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.