“I have a voracious appetite for all things, worldly and unworldly.”

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’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.

It sucks being judged by the world instead of your close friends or family. I try to just realise that the only people who matter are my family and friends.

Remember that everyone’s life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.

The world is so full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.

Well, don’t we all feel like jumping to the end of the world sometimes?

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

Something very beautiful happens to people when their world’s fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.

My parents are so amazing, and they’ve travelled around the world with me.