“I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.”

Fortunately, as we all know, it’s impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.

I think we’ve always been better live.

Sometimes you work with somebody you’ve never heard of because you just feel like working.

I think I drift toward sad love songs.

I’m playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there’s Howie. Tom’s in the middle and we’re playing all this stuff I love. It’s great.

If you call attention to yourself at the expense of the song, that’s the cardinal sin.

We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it’s probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it’s hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.

Working with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson takes you up another level.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that’s great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don’t want to get in the way of the song.

I loved working with Bob Dylan.

I do have friends that are Republicans, and we have very spirited conversations on a whole range of issues. I am often baffled by why they are Republicans, but I enjoy the dialogue and can move beyond politics to find common ground in my personal relationships.

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

Mindfulness is developing an awareness of the thoughts and feelings that we move through without getting drawn into the meanings or taking action or getting sucked into the story.

An acting teacher once told me, ‘Greet everything with yes… Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.’

As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.

The 1992 crisis proved that the existing system was unstable. Not moving forward to the euro would have set up Europe for even more disruptive crises.

Nothing in the world is as mobile as capital. It can move anywhere in the world instantaneously.

A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.