I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.

The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

Musically, I am still hooked and just hypnotized by the sound of the guitar itself. I mean, a guitar sounds good if you drop it on the floor.

I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.

Take time daily to reflect on how much you have. It may not be all that you want but remember someone somewhere is dreaming of what you own.

You must have something in order to give it up.

Everyone's a singer now, thanks to karaoke, for better and for much worse. But the live band is now becoming ancient history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

We change our opinions of ourselves so often. What the outside world thinks is only a small part of our image.

Actors always want you to believe something else even though that's the truth and to do that well it's almost a dying art.

Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?