I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

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

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.

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.

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.

Be of good courage.

I do not know that everything happens for a reason. I simply know that everything happens.

I always say there are no coincidences.

Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation and everything that is finest in human history.

If other people see you differently, you’ll end up seeing them differently, too.

Love can make you immortal

The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.

One should never learn from one's mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure.

Having set one's family in consonance with the community, he should make his family prosperous to ensure the prosperity of the community.

They're asking women to do impossible things. I don't believe women can carry a pack, live in a foxhole, or go a week without a bath.