“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.”

Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

The greatest satisfaction is not the decoration. It is knowing that I am able to help someone who needs help.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

I don’t like to tell people what format they can get things in, or say, “I’m only going to release this on vinyl and nothing else. You have to come to my world.” I don’t like to say that to people either. But, I do think there’s a loss of romance.

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 approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It’s fragile. I don’t have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.

Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

I have about 50 guitars around the house. I can’t take more than a few steps without finding one to pick up.

You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect.

I used to play violin, but I wasn’t very good! I’m starting to learn guitar.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

It’s hard to go out in front of people with an acoustic guitar and improvise for 30 or 40 minutes, but I had a compulsion to do it. I just had to in a way that I can’t really explain.