“The electric guitar was vital in helping what I’ve achieved where would I be without it? Playing awfully quietly, for a start.”

But I’ve always felt very comfortable on stage, even if I screw up. It always felt like a dog, this is my turf, piss around it. While I’m here, nothing else can happen. All I can do is screw up. Otherwise, have a good time.

Some things get better with age. Like me.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

One of the great things about songwrighting; it’s not an intellectual experience.

I only get ill when I give up drugs. I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.

We age not by holding on to youth, but by letting ourselves grow and embracing whatever youthful parts remain.

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.

I look for ambiguity when I’m writing because life is ambiguous.

I don’t wave a flag for anything. I’m a musician.

I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor . Everything was there in his playing – the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.

If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted elegantly.

I haven’t stopped smoking; anything.

I read the Bible sometimes, but it bores me to death. I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.

I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It’s really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.

Everybody thinks you reach a certain age and you’re a grownup, but it’s not true. Nobody grows up until the day they croak.

Poison’s not bad. It’s a matter of how much.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD.

I’m trying to have a guitar built. What’s needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.

The citation for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reads, ‘for contribution to the knowledge of electronic structures and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals,’ and therefore implies that the Prize has been awarded for a long series of studies extending practically over my whole scientific life.

The millions who would have watched Manchester United and Chelsea would have seen a non-stop game in which the pace was electric even though the first half was a non-event.

Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris.

I went to my friend’s house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp

A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.

When you’re onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it’s very artificial. You can’t really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.