“I really wasn’t needed. Just straightening up riffs, that’s all. Just two guitarists doing it instead of one.”

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

The greatest satisfaction is not the decoration. It is knowing that I am able to help someone who needs help.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

I don’t like to tell people what format they can get things in, or say, “I’m only going to release this on vinyl and nothing else. You have to come to my world.” I don’t like to say that to people either. But, I do think there’s a loss of romance.

This week, I’m a gypsy. Maybe next week it’ll be glitter rock.

I bet you can’t play slide piano.

I’m not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I’m turned on to… if people want to find things, they find them themselves.

There’s such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar… flamenco, jazz, rock, blues. You name it, it’s there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

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.

He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.

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

My son, Wolfgang, plays drums, guitars and bass.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn’t teach it in school.

I mean, the sound of an amplified guitar in a room full of people was so hypnotic and addictive to me, that I could cross any kind of border to get on there.

I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.

Everything that came later… the roots are all there in the first album.