I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

Musically, I am still hooked and just hypnotized by the sound of the guitar itself. I mean, a guitar sounds good if you drop it on the floor.

I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.

I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.

Tread lightly on your partner’s heart. It was given to you for safekeeping.

My mother had handed down respect for the possibilities...and the will to grasp them.

When you're making movies you've got to get obsessive.

I don't want three million people digesting my private life over their cornflakes.

Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

The old Devil gets mad when you're trying to do good. Pray that God will move the stumbling blocks.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.