Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

When I was a little boy, I told my dad, 'When I grow up, I want to be a musician.' My dad said: 'You can't do both, Son'.

A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that.

Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

Copying one person is stealing. Copying ten is research.

It takes a lot of devotion and work, or maybe I should say play, because if you love it, that's what it amounts to I haven't found any shortcuts, and I've been looking for a long time.

Once you become predictable, no one's interested anymore.

You shape your own destiny.

If you hear something you like, and you're halfway like the public, chances are they'll like it too.

It took me 20 years to learn I couldn't tune too well. And by that time I was too rich to care.

Elvis changed the country music scene quite a bit; he almost put country music out of business.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.

Jesus himself talked about prayer and meditation. Anything that brings you closer to the Lord, what's wrong with that?

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind.

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.

I was interested in politics since the age of 14.

Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you.

If a problem is insoluble, it is Necessity. Leave it alone.

All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.