“For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.”

There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

I’ll try any guitar just to see if it’s different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere.

I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win!

You can’t repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.

The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially.

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.

Too much of a good thing is just about right

And when you don’t have to talk to the person next to you, that’s real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn’t get exposed to.

What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

I’m goin’ where the wind don’t blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

If something doesn’t work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn’t going to work.

He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn’t come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

The smell of oak reminds me of summers spent sleeping under canvas, crackling fires and roasted coffee, the soft sound of guitar and voices in unison.

Yes, I took up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15, in high school.

Country music isn’t a guitar, it isn’t a banjo, it isn’t a melody, it isn’t a lyric. It’s a feeling.

Charlie Christians’ contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons’ contributions to the world.

It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn’t play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.