“One of the great things about songwrighting; it’s not an intellectual experience.”

Rock and roll ain’t nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

What’s the big deal about still working? Retirement age is sixty-five, and that’s at a normal job – and I ain’t there yet.

Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.

But I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: “Do you know this feeling?

I personally believe that most people that play an instrument would be able to write a few songs here and there. But they say, “I tried, I can’t do it” and give up and don’t try it again; they get too discouraged.

Fame has killed more very talented guys than drugs. Jimi Hendrix didn’t die of an overdose, he died of fame.

[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.

This is the rock ‘n’ roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.

Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.

It’s an addiction and addiction is something I should know something about.

You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.

If you say I’m great, thank you very much. But I know what I am. I could be better, man, you know?

Yes, I’ve been trepanned. That’s quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.

We had many more points of agreement than we had points of difference, but we did differ, and the bigger we got, the more insistent we got that each one of us should have his way.

No one dare disturb the sound of silence.

One man by delaying saved the state for us.

One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.

He who civilly shows the way to one who has missed it, is as one who has lighted another’s lamp from his own lamp; it none the less gives light to himself when it burns for the other.

And in this fashion learns to know oneself,

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

A mouse never entrusts his life to only one hole.