“What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It’s the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: ‘He passed it on.’”

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.

The electric guitar was vital in helping what I’ve achieved where would I be without it? Playing awfully quietly, for a start.

I look for ambiguity when I’m writing because life is ambiguous.

I don’t wave a flag for anything. I’m a musician.

I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor . Everything was there in his playing – the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.

If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted elegantly.

I haven’t stopped smoking; anything.

I read the Bible sometimes, but it bores me to death. I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.

I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It’s really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.

Everybody thinks you reach a certain age and you’re a grownup, but it’s not true. Nobody grows up until the day they croak.

Poison’s not bad. It’s a matter of how much.

I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.

Love has sold more songs than you’ve had hot dinners.

Guitar is easy, all it takes is 5 fingers, 6 strings and 1 a**hole.

Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money.

I never sleep alone. If there is no one to sleep next to, I’ll sleep next to a stuffed animal. It makes me feel secure and safe. It’s a little embarrassing to admit it; I’m an old man now. It’s important to me though.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Being known for musicals is a great thing.

Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we’re one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

I’m an ‘evolve or die’ kind of a musician. I think it’s cool to try new things.

For some musicians it becomes self-reflexive to think, “I have to write some of my kind of songs now.”