“You can’t buy time. Everything, for me, seems to be a race against time. Especially musically.”

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.

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

I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. Its not contrived.

It’s important for me to be with a musician or someone who has a creative mind.

The music that I listened to when I was growing up was the most important to me forever.

I really wanted to take ‘Dilbar’ to Africa and the Middle East in Arabic because it was also a perfect way to launch myself.

Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It’s not gonna work. Everything that’s good is really instant.

I’d like to be remembered as someone who wasn’t satisfied with just one level of musicianship as someone who was a pioneer.

Music was my ultimate ambition but I liked all of it. I wanted to discipline myself in dance and acting too and I’d done all three since I was 9-years-old. I could sing, but I didn’t become a great singer.

I’ve been making music for a while. And I could read about myself on the Internet for a while.