“The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It’s more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.”

The worst thing you can become in life is cynical. Cynical is like concrete. and nothing grows in concrete.

You meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: ‘Write this down’

Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.

The guitar is your first wings. It’s assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

When you are in your heart of hearts, you can see beyond appearances.

There is divinity in your DNA. Live your light.

I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

I knuckle down with my demons, and with my weaknesses.

Live up to your convictions. You walk in grace or you walk in fear. You can’t have it both ways.

The Devil is like a strainer that separates the mud from the gold.

I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy I am here to give voice to the invisible.

Your mind is a magnet. You don’t attract what you need or what you want; you attract who you are. And I love who I am!

There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

There is nothing more contagious on this planet than enthusiasm.

The best part of touring, still, is touching people’s hearts and igniting my band and igniting the people into what you call a spiritual revelation is sound and emotion.

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.

A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that’s not right, all the strings should be off.

A lot of people said to me, ‘Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!’

But the guitar, when you think about it, is the most versatile, really. I mean you can pick it up and take it with you wherever you go.

A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I’m very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.