“I can only listen to what I’m working on, at the time. I can’t listen to anything else because I don’t want to copy it.”

So far I’ve been very, very fortunate because it appears that people like to hear the music I like to play. What more fortunate position can a musician be in?

There’s too many good musicians around for the music around for the business to be sagging.

Seeing people’s faces, really getting off on them, makes me incredibly happy. Genuinely.

I guess the solo from ‘Achilles Last Stand’ is in the same tradition as the solo from ‘Stairway to Heaven’ It is on that level to me.

Sometimes, I must admit, I’d like to have a second guitarist onstage with me, but it wouldn’t look right. I’d like to play for another 20 years, but I don’t know. I just can’t see it happening. I don’t know why. It’s a certain foreboding. A funny feeling. Vultures.

The gut-strung guitar, the classical guitar, that is a whole different world on its own. When you think what the guitar can do and what every individual player does with a guitar, everyone has their own identity coming through the guitar.

I don’t feel I have to top myself at all.

I don’t go walking into things blind.

I can listen to all different sorts of music. I don’t really care about The Next Big Thing.

I really don’t like showing people how I play things; it’s a little embarrassing because it always looks so simple to me.

There’s always music that moves me. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s within the parenthesis of rock or blues, or whatever. It’s usually far more reaching than that. It can be in many different genres.

I don’t care what critics and other people think.

I’m attracted by the unknown, but I take precautions.

But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn’t do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs – Early Days – which is what it is – and Latter Days.

I’m pretty optimistic about the future of rock… it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

Right from the first time we went to America in 1968, Led Zeppelin was a word-of-mouth thing. You can’t really compare it to how it is today.

I’m starting to see players copy what I do. I’m flattered.

It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work.

People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.

American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan. But they don’t know what to copy.

At home I have a copy of the April 21, 1986, issue of ‘Sports Illustrated.’ I’m on the cover with the blurb, ‘Can Lou Do It?’ I’d just arrived at Notre Dame, and with spring football underway, I was the focal point of that week’s coverage.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.