I soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

I've always stuck with Gibsons. I've had Guilds and Fenders, too, but I always wind up going back to Gibsons.

As a solo artist, I just felt cemented in front of the mike stand. There was very little time to play with the audience and be a band member.

I don't like looking back.

When you sign with a label, they do insist upon certain rights, and if you have a competent attorney, your rights will be protected.

There were some older guitarists on my side of town, and I got to know many of them.

I feel like I have the greatest life an artist could dream of.

If music became extinct now, I don't know what I'd be good for.

I soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

I like being on the road, living in hotels. While I've got a real nice house, I go crazy when I'm there.

When it stops being fun, stop.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write.

I wish I had a nickel for every song that I've left in the bathroom, written down on a matchbox, or just totally forgotten about.

I'm not the kind of guy who deserves to play a vintage guitar because I'm too rough on instruments.

I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I was born in Alabama and my first live music experiences were in church. Every Sunday we watched regional gospel groups on television singing their hearts out.

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.

Success is fickle, but creativity is a gift.

It is all about being open and paying attention to the music in your head. I think most people have original music playing in their heads from time to time.

Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you're finished. You're a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already.

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day.

Make sure you know what you are signing when you sign a recording contract.

Les Pauls work out real well for me because I'll beat the hell out of them and they'll still work. The only trouble with them is finding good ones.

When I was about 3, my grandfather used to give me and my sister a nickel to sit out on the front porch with him and sing songs.

It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords.

When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.

On acoustic guitar I tend to stay in the key of D for some reason. On electric guitar I keep basic: C, G, D, and A. The key of D minor is also real good for me.

I don't write on tour. There is so much to do day in and day out when you are on the road.

I have always been a sucker for the big, upbeat chorus.

When I became 16 I started thinking seriously about singing.

I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations, where nothing is out of bounds.

I'd better be on the road, or I'll be going nuts. I'm not the kind of guy who sits around with a pipe and slippers watching soap operas.

We're kind of defined by our mistakes.

Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.

Timing is everything.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

By the time I did that third solo album, I'd finally learned how to do it, but I'd also learned that I liked being in a band.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

I would rather take the role and work and make my own money and self respect than to have sex with someone who has a lot of money.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.