“I wanted to play saxophone, but all I could get were a few squeaks.”

You know, there’s a big lie in this business. The lie is that it’s okay to go out in flames. But that doesn’t do anybody much good. I may be wrong, but I think Hendrix was trying to come around.

So, my big brother was playing guitar and I figured I’d try it too.

You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other – our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That’s to help each other, not hurt each other.

Your sound is in your hands as much as anything. It’s the way you pick, and the way you hold the guitar, more than it is the amp or the guitar you use.

I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn’t death.

Music really is a way to reach out and hold on to each other in a healthy way.

I’ve put my life back together, but it’s all a growing process and that’s neat, too, because if you stop growing, what good is it musically? So that is what I am looking forward to – growing. In some ways, I felt stagnant in my life and it showed.

Even though there’s reasons to try things that may or may not work, it’s still a real intimate way to finish the song with everybody right there in the band just locked in.

I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn’t have any drums.

The whole deal is when you walk onstage, you’re up there bigger than life. People idolize you.

You know, right now, the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all, I thank God I’m alive today, and I mean that. You see, I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing.

That’s how it happens, livin life by the drop.

It is the human things that make life good, the unexpected kindness, the friendly note, the bracing word, the neighbour’s extra loaf of bread she leaves at our back door.

The problem with taking amps to a shop is that they come back sounding like another amp.

What I am trying to get across to you; is please take of yourselves and those that you love; because that is what we are hear for, that’s all we got, and that is all we can take with us. Are you with me?

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I’m only looking at a friend.

Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.

Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles’ faces on it. It would be a collector’s item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

I came to NAMM once and saw this guitar that self-tuned, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is the future!’ And I’ve never seen it again.

I play piano all the time. I’m always at my piano, playing music.

The mind is not conscious, it is an instrument of consciousness.