ANDRES SEGOVIA

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

When one puts up a building one makes an elaborate scaffold to get everything into its proper place. But when one takes the scaffold down, the building must stand by itself with no trace of the means by which it was erected. That is how a musician should work.

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth.

Among God's creatures two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes, in order not to be separated from the man.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

You know what I think? If I am tired now, I don't mind, because I have eternity to rest.

I've had three wives and three guitars. I still play the guitars.

Whoever heard of an electric violin, electric cello or, for that matter, an electric singer?

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice.

Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?

I've had only three wives and three guitars in my life, though I've flirted with others.

(I was) my own teacher and pupil, and thanks to the efforts of both, they were not discontented with each other.

A man without patience is a lamp without oil.

Sometimes one is without the pleasure of playing. But when the silence of the audience is perfect, we recover that.

Every guitarist has a special quality of sound. The best ones will use a good ear, much sensitivity and a thorough knowledge of music to prepare the nuances and colors of sound.

When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices.

The guitar is the most unpredictable and least reliable musical instrument in existence...and also the sweetest, the warmest, the most delicate, whose melancholic voice awakes in our soul exquisite reveries.

Record the album after the tour.

It is always about discovering what, hidden, does not lie on the paper.

I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer.

The guitar is the easiest instrument to play and the hardest to play well.

I was my own teacher and pupil, in a comradeship so firm and persevering that the most trying incidents of my life served only to strengthen the union.

My prayer to the Lord every day, is this-I have been a great sinner. I do not deserve Heaven. Let me stay here.

It is not so hard to be original, what is hard, is to be original with continuity.