“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 got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you’re playing an instrument that is really hard.

Let’s just say I’m like a ship passing through storms, resting in ports now and then until it’s time to continue the journey. I once told a friend, `I’m just looking for an angel with a broken wing – one that couldn’t fly away.’

There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That’s a personal point of view but that’s the way I see it. I think that’s what it’s all about. The drive, the fire, the passion – it all comes out on the guitar.

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.

Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

Cinema affects everything, from the way I get dressed to how I build my stages.

The most effective way to do it, is to just do it.

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Nothing perhaps affects man’s character more than the company he keeps

Not letting our mood affect the way we treat people is a forgotten sunnah

If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of whom your actions affect.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.