Hunter S. Thompson

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

Les Paul was one of the great innovators of the early electric guitar, and he made some fantastic guitar records. To me, Les Paul is very much it.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

No, working is what will keep you alive.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands …If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.