Once you start copying other people's licks, you begin thinking they're yours. Doing that's just an easy way out.

A certain death of an artist is overconfidence.

The first real thing I heard was Three O'Clock Blues by B.B. King. That's where it all began for me.

I can't say I feel influenced by today's guitar players.

I didn't want to get attached to one guitar; I didn't want to have an instrument that was irreplaceable.

It all comes down to the density of the wood. Every guitar's different.

I go through about two Fender mediums a night because I don't pick straight down; it's sort of sideways, and it shaves them off.

I don't tend to have a favorite album; I tend to have favorite tracks. There are flaws in every album that spoil it for me.

I got a guitar when I was about 14, for a Christmas present, and went from there.

It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.

When you start believing you're something special, then you're not going to be striving to move forward.

If having problems feels like a problem to you, it may not be the problems themselves, but the way you think about them that is the problem.

If you keep fighting with yourself, you will have less energy to fight with life!

I've always been criticized, right from the beginning! Right from the very first day I was born... They said I wasn't right for the part!

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.

You never know who’s watching.

What if River Phoenix had lived?

There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.

These so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream; if you marginalize them, you radicalize them.

Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.