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

Everything they'd been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.

Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

I can sustain the impetus over the long tours we do is by feeding off the energy that we get back from an audience. That's my fuel. All i've got is this burning energy, especially when i've got a guitar in my hands.

Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.

Minimalism has a certain charm. You say, that's a bit monotonous, but by the time it's finished, you're wishing it hadn't.

I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused.

There is no such thing as a rock-and-roll venue; there's not one in the world that's made to play this kind of music as an ideal form.

The electric guitar meant that you could have a band with a drummer and a couple of guitars. And that put a lot of horn players out of work.

The idea of retiring is like killing yourself. It's almost like Hari Kari. I intend to live to a 100 and go down in history.

I've got nothing against daylight. I don't live totally nocturnally. Only when I feel like it. Which is most of the time.

Well, I'm not putting death on the agenda. I don't want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet. He's the guy I'm gonna see, isn't it? I'm not going to the Other Place, let's face it.

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It's the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: 'He passed it on.'

And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues.

One minute I'm standing at Ronnie Scott's getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I'm on a marble slab.

I don't have a problem with drugs, I have a problem with policemen.

One guy can ruin an instrument. Jimi Hendrix, bless his heart -- how I wish he was still around -- almost inadvertently ruined guitar. Because he was the only cat who could do it like that. Everybody else just screwed it up, and thought wailing away (on the guitar) is the answer. But it ain't; you've got to be a Jimi to do that, you've got to be one of the special cats.

Before Elvis, everything was in black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious Technicolor.

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

To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you.