“If you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses because they’re asleep.”

The public library is the great equaliser.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.

Rock and roll ain’t nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

What’s the big deal about still working? Retirement age is sixty-five, and that’s at a normal job – and I ain’t there yet.

Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.

But I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: “Do you know this feeling?

I personally believe that most people that play an instrument would be able to write a few songs here and there. But they say, “I tried, I can’t do it” and give up and don’t try it again; they get too discouraged.

Fame has killed more very talented guys than drugs. Jimi Hendrix didn’t die of an overdose, he died of fame.

[John] Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards.

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.

This is the rock ‘n’ roll life, and you had to invent it as you went along. There was no textbook to say how you operate this machinery.

Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.

It’s an addiction and addiction is something I should know something about.

You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.

If you say I’m great, thank you very much. But I know what I am. I could be better, man, you know?