“I can communicate far better on a guitar than I can through my mouth.”

The only term I won’t accept is “genius.”

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

There’s music that can affect people in their lives, and they will always relate to the point that they heard it and experienced it, either if you’re playing it or you’re receptive, as an audience.

Crowley didn’t have a very high opinion of women, and I don’t think he was wrong.

I’m over 30 now, but I didn’t expect to be here.

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 can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Nelson Mandela, a better man, not a bitter man, made our world a better place in which to live. His life and leadership exemplify the highest courage, dignity, and dedication to human liberation.

My mother made countless sacrifices so that her children – and all children – could grow up in a better nation and world.

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

Who takes care of their people better? FEMA or Hezbollah?

I still got bars, I just use ’em differently. I’d say I’m a better singer than I am a rapper at this point because I’ve been sharpening my sword.

The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?