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

I can communicate far better on a guitar than I can through my mouth.

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I’m doing.

I’m very fortunate because I love what I’m doing.

You can’t just find yourself doing something and not happy doing it.

I’ve never regretted anything I’ve ever done.

I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn’t teach it in school.

I will still carry on changing all the time.

You don’t find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn’t mean to say you can’t be really good.

A lot of people can’t be on their own. They get frightened. Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

I know where I’m going musically. I can see my pattern and I’m going much slower than I thought I’d be going.

I don’t like being stuck in one situation, day to day.

Live Aid did feel like one hour’s rehearsal after several years, but to be part of Live Aid was wonderful. It reall was.

When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go.

Everything that came later… the roots are all there in the first album.

I like change and I like contrast.

The music had to be rooted, and yet had to branch out, like the wild imagination of a child.

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

My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.

Very much like that, and very much a loner, do you know and I didn’t fit really into sport or all kind of group activities as a kid, I couldn’t find a niche. And music was not really part of the kind of village curriculum it would, you know.

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

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

Having played with other musicians, I don’t even think The Beatles were that good.

But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.