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.

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'.

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.

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

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.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

I feel like I need to start wearing a T-shirt saying 'This is not a photo opportunity'. People are so lovely but you do find that when you're out you spend 40% of your time posing for photographs.

Suiciders are willing to kill innocent life in order to send the projection that this is an impossible mission.

Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.

Ian sighed wanly. "I once had the means to be gaga over art–before I found myself in a country where the standard of beauty is toaster waffles shaped like cartoon characters.

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.

Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of liberals. It is liberalism that for decades has rejected any protest as 'censorship' or 'McCarthyism.'

The universe doesn't owe you a sense of hope

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.