Les Paul

No, working is what will keep you alive.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

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

The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

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

Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.

Jazz is America’s classical music.

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’