I feel I've been blessed with a gift of creativity and composition. That's why I've been able to keep going.

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.

Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.

Every experience is enduring adventure.

how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

Patience lightens the burthen we cannot avert.

Perhaps God brought you into this mess so that he can bring you out of it for his glory.

So many of my family and friends had lost their battles against cancer. What could I do that my relatives and friends had not? What could I do that would be different?

I love mathematics...principally because it is beautiful; because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game the encompassing of the infinite.

There is good evidence that last year's European heat wave was influenced by global warming. It resulted in 26,000 premature deaths and cost $13.5bn.