“Just because you play bass, doesn’t mean you have no presence.”

This week, I’m a gypsy. Maybe next week it’ll be glitter rock.

I bet you can’t play slide piano.

I’m not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I’m turned on to… if people want to find things, they find them themselves.

There’s such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar… flamenco, jazz, rock, blues. You name it, it’s there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

The only term I won’t accept is “genius.”

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

There’s music that can affect people in their lives, and they will always relate to the point that they heard it and experienced it, either if you’re playing it or you’re receptive, as an audience.

Crowley didn’t have a very high opinion of women, and I don’t think he was wrong.

I’m over 30 now, but I didn’t expect to be here.

My guitar style was developed during that 10-year period. That’s me. That’s the way I play, and I don’t wish to play any other way. Our own individual identities are firmly stamped on this album.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else – building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

I spend a lot of time near water.

Once I get onstage the tension explodes and I’m fine. I’m in another world – in a trance almost, doing what I love best, expressing myself through guitar.

I think it’s time to travel, start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world.

There’s a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term “genius,” but you’re treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers.

I’m not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That’ll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that’s what I wanted it to be.

I remember when I thought of singing as the bit that went between the guitar playing – something I couldn’t wait to get out of the way. Singing was originally like a chore that I didn’t really enjoy.

My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.

I can tell how far I ought to be going, I know how to get there, all I’ve got to do is keep playing.

First the movie, the actual playing of the role and trying to deliver what everybody wanted. Then, when the film came out, there was instant fame. I was just a kid from Sweden, I didn’t know what was going on.

I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other … I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.

Having played with other musicians, I don’t even think The Beatles were that good.