“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.”

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.

If you are on to something creative, school can also inhibit you. The wrong teacher, man, can really mess you up.

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

I’m just looking for an angel with a broken wing.

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.

There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They’re very, very precious to me.

I do really believe that all guitarists have a different character that comes through, that’s a strong character, the stronger the person is.

The term “genius” gets used far too loosely in rock & roll.

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.

My favorite guitar solo of all time was Elliot Randall’s on `Reelin’ In The Years’.

Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was – there’s no doubt about it. There’s never been anybody since. He’s one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

Dance music is like a virus, it has affected so many different genres.

Though how nature works is way beyond man’s ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.

Poverty disproportionately affects women around the world.

Even an idle phone conversation when driving takes a 40 percent bite out of your focus and, surprisingly, can have the same effect as being drunk.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you– But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.

The Congress is virtually incapable of passing any reforms unless they first get permission from the powerful special interests who are most affected by the proposal.