“You can’t just find yourself doing something and not happy doing it.”

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.

I can tell how far I ought to be going, I know how to get there, all I’ve got to do is keep playing.

My favorite guitar solo of all time was Elliot Randall’s on `Reelin’ In The Years’.

Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was – there’s no doubt about it. There’s never been anybody since. He’s one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

Smile doesn’t mean that someone is happy. Sometimes it just means that you’re strong.

Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.

He who is alone is happy. Do good to all, like everyone, but do not love anyone. It is a bondage, and bondage brings only misery. Live alone in your mind – that is happiness. To have nobody to care for and never minding who cares for one is the way to be free.

People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

Children internalize their parents’ unhappiness. Fortunately, they absorb our contentment just as readily.

I’m happy that I have brought laughter because I have been shown by many the value of it in so many lives, in so many ways.