“It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.”

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.

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.

It’s been up to me to inspire me.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

If rejection destroys your self-esteem, you’re letting others hold you as an emotional hostage.

There is new hope among people that this dispensation can fulfill their aspirations.

Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew–knew–that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

I’m very emotional. I think I may go mad in several years’ time.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.