“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 many people are frightened to take a chance in life and there’s so many chances you have to take.

Music can always be a life-changing experience, for musicians and fans, or at least life-affecting, but it depends on to what degree.

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 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.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

I really haven’t seen The Report in a long time. I don’t have a copy, but I’ll have to see it again. I think it would be good to put both these men next to each other.

Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

It’s not just about looking and copying, it’s about feeling too.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

It’s been very important throughout my career that I’ve met all the guys I’ve copied, because at each stage they’ve said, ‘Don’t play like me, play like you.’

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.