Les Paul

I think the most important thing about playing is to walk out with confidence, look the people right in the eye and say ‘Here I am,’ and go and do your thing. As soon as they know you’re confident, they’re confident. As long as you adjust to them you’re not in trouble. You should eyeball them, find out what they want, and give it to them. They didn’t pay to come out and look at the tapestries.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Life is a lot like jazz. It’s best when you improvise.

There’s only one bass player in a band. I’m the best bass player of any band I’m in.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

Jazz amounts to Blues, your unique sound and the elusive genius of improvisation.

We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

Everyone is working who should be.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.