“It’s very dependent on your state of mind. And your emotional state as well. And a lot of it comes pouring out, you don’t really have that much control with it.”

Music will always find its way to us, with or without business, politics, religion, or any other bullshit attached.

Oh yeah, I mean, it wasn’t a very good guitar, most good guitars have got thrust rods in the necks that you can adjust or that’ll keep them in shape, you know keep them straight. This one just, well it turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months.

Well, I think part of my gift, or if I have one, is that I love listening.

I did play a lot of fingerstyle when I first started playing. I could never really find the right combination of flatpick or fingerpick, so playing fingerstyle is really the easiest way – though it’s quite strenuous on the fingertips.

The first band I identified with from Chicago was the Muddy Waters band.

When I’m wrong it’s never meant for you, so don’t confuse my love with what I do.

I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me – it resonated.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.

The thing about pessimism is that in most cases it’s nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.

I used to do crazy things that people would bail me out of, and I’m just grateful that I survived. But the music got very lost; I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t really care. I was more into just having a good time, and I think it showed.

It’s taken me to be an older guy, an old man, to have an old man’s voice. Because I only liked old men’s voices. As a kid, I didn’t like pip-squeaked singers.

In playing, I suppose my greatest gift was to express the way I felt or the willingness to express myself.

Musically, he was like an old man in a boy’s skin.

They looked great, you know the drawings of the guys playing looked great and bits of string around their necks. So it didn’t seem to be that difficult a thing to do, or that inaccessible.

Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it’s all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.

So there I was in Hollywood, thinking I was doing good.

Worry is a waste of energy. It cant change the past. It cant control the future. It only makes today miserable.

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness – and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.

When you let go of things that are not under your control. I hope the loneliness does not become so dense that the silence starts to speak.

You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.

Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! control the present! Live supremely well now! This is the way of the wise.

I felt in a lot of instances I was deliberately being put through stress because when you’re a guy who generates money, people have a vested interest in controlling you.

She has constellations in her wilding soul, a soft-paced heart in a spirit beyond control.