Slash Quotes

When your hair is rising, that's when you know it's a good song - that's happened to me with some artists and some songs, John Lennon songs or when Nina Simone sings. It's great to make those moments yourself.

I think everyone has music inside them, and my hope is that I can help them find it.

I'll tell you what's crazy: Nobody in my family is musically inclined, no form, fashion, anything. I always had some type of connection to music though. This was long before I ever knew that I could sing, or I ever even tried to start singing. It was something different, man, it made me feel some type of way.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

When you listen to a song, it should make you sit up and wonder, 'Hey, what is this!' or give you an inexplicable feeling of joy or relate beautifully to the music in you.

One of my mottos for 'Currents' was 'Give the song what it deserves.' How would this song flourish? If the song could tell me what it wants, what can I give it? I tried not to dictate it with any sensible or logical decisions.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

Maybe its a case of one guitar feeling a certain way to the hands that makes one subsequently move differently over the strings, but my intent is always to wring the maximum emotional resonance out of the object in hand.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.

Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.

To me, the guitar is a tool for songwriting, and it's fun, too. The day that it's not fun, that's when I'm not gonna play guitar anymore.

I've always loved music, but I never really played anything. After 'Walk the Line' and learning to play guitar, and having that sense of performing, I think that certainly opened the door for me, for music.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.

I fell in love with the piano. I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it's something which is higher than words.

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I asked for a guitar when I was 8 years old for Christmas. I have no idea why. I never had any guitar heroes. I still don't. But there must have been something in me because I've been playing for 30 years.

I got a guitar when I was six and, instead of learning other people's songs, started to try to write my own, even at that young age.

There's nothing but spirit in music. That's all it is. Yeah, there's a lot of intellectual elements to it, but no matter how you approach it, it's all spirit.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.