“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.”

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

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I’m doing.

I’m very fortunate because I love what I’m doing.

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

I’ve never regretted anything I’ve ever done.

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

I will still carry on changing all the time.

You don’t find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn’t mean to say you can’t be really good.

A lot of people can’t be on their own. They get frightened. Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

I know where I’m going musically. I can see my pattern and I’m going much slower than I thought I’d be going.

I don’t like being stuck in one situation, day to day.

Live Aid did feel like one hour’s rehearsal after several years, but to be part of Live Aid was wonderful. It reall was.

When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go.

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

I like change and I like contrast.

The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

I really haven’t seen The Report in a long time. I don’t have a copy, but I’ll have to see it again. I think it would be good to put both these men next to each other.

Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

It’s not just about looking and copying, it’s about feeling too.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

It’s been very important throughout my career that I’ve met all the guys I’ve copied, because at each stage they’ve said, ‘Don’t play like me, play like you.’