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.

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

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.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new, That which they have done but earnest of the things which they shall do.

The relationship changes as you learn more about people, and the work sort of takes on its own life. I enjoy this very much.

Boys don't really like big nerdy glasses. Not so much.

There is only one heaven, one earth and one queen (me) Queen Elizabeth is an impostor.

we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.

If you have political convictions... keep 'em to yourself

I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.

More women speaking up and seizing the helm of power can create its own momentum. It can change the culture that helps perpetuate those external forces.

Lobbyists are the touts of protected industries.