If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising.

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.

I wanted to be able to play guitar. I wanted to be able to make music hurt.

Every musical movement that is big enough has to produce some good musicians who wouldn't have had the incentive to start playing without it.

In those days, between the ages of 12 and 18 you meant nothing. You were the extra place at the side table if someone came to dinner. You were of no interest to anyone.

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can't play is the dominant one.

The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

Once you became associated with a children's show, you're finished.

It's not about you. It's about them.

Dedicated selfless people shape the future

Don't throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery.

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile - that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.

The publication of the Revised New Testament by the two University Presses on May 17, 1881, was the most sensational in the annals of publishing.

Sing lullabie, as women do,Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;And lullabie can I sing to,As womanly as can the best.

I can't remember, because I never knew.

My best ideas come to me at unexpected moments, like when I'm reading children's books to my kids (the pictures inspire me), shopping, driving somewhere, seeing different things.

There are moments when you love babies, and you're like, "God, they are the reason why we exist." Then they start crying, and you're like "God! Jesus!"