“I don’t deal in technique. I deal in emotions.”

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.

If you’re working at the factory and you’re cursing every day that you get up, at all costs get out of it. You’ll just make yourself ill.

From the beginning, I’ve had to juggle and weigh the silly things people say – and I’ve learnt that they’re meaningless, and they’re mostly inaccurate. So I don’t worry about it, because there’s nothin’ for me to deal with.

Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.

Failure is a part of life and you have to learn to deal with it. Failure is something that is part of life’s cycle and it’s from failure that you gain life experience.

I’m working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.

November Rain is a song about not wanting to be in a state of having to deal with unrequited love.

Good leaders need a positive agenda, not just an agenda of dealing with crisis.

There’s not an instruction manual on how to deal with success, so you just have to rely on having great friends and a good team.

Success in dealing with people depends on sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint.