Top 236 Quotes & Sayings by Jimmy Page - Page 2

If I'm going to put my image into something, I'll put my image into something that I actually feel like I'd like to do.

If you listen to our work, from 'Led Zeppelin I' to 'Coda,' it's just a fantastic textbook.

How many guitars do I have? I don't know. I don't know! But I think the answer to it is, more than I can play at any one point in time. Even though I do have double necks, so I can try and play more than at one time!

I was really competitive with myself.

I was always good at hearing complete arrangements in my head.

You want that - peers respecting what you're doing.

When I was still in the Yardbirds, our producer, Mickie Most, would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. During one session, we recorded 'Ten Little Indians,' an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement.

The re-releases have more than doubled the amount of Led Zeppelin work out there. I wanted it done authoritatively, 'cause I was the one writing the stuff; I was the producer and mixer. I don't think it's any more weird than writing your autobiography.

You'll find so many of the guitarists from the '60s will all say Lonnie Donegan was the influence.

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

I consider descending chromatic lines and arpeggiated chords basic skills learned by any student of the guitar.

I'm not a guitar hero.

Listening to John Bonham is just a sheer celebration of his playing - it can't help but fill you with so much joy.

Nobody could have predicted the effect of John Bonham's drum introduction on 'Good Times, Bad Times,' because no matter what he'd played in before, he'd never had the chance to flex his muscles and play like John Bonham.

I always want to do my very best, and it's frustrating to have something hold me back.

The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.

Jack White is an extraordinary person because he's like a three-dimensional chess player. He thinks so far ahead.

Led Zeppelin wasn't a corporate entity.

Here's where it goes with Led Zeppelin. It didn't matter what was going on around us, because the character of Led Zeppelin's music was so strong.

There is no point in putting out 'The Complete BBC Sessions,' and someone's growling that you missed something.

I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.

Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.

I can understand why we got bad reviews. We went right over people's heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we'd done before. People didn't know what was going on.

Because we spent so much time in the States in the beginning, we weren't able to do so much in England. It was slower catching up. And we didn't have radio here like what was called underground radio over there. So we got these little slots on the BBC.

'Communication Breakdown' - it was punchy and direct, with a real attitude that was different to other bands going around.

I don't really want to go on about my personal beliefs or my involvement in magic. I'm not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I'm turned on to.

Led Zeppelin isn't done yet, quite clearly, because every year since 1968 there's been new fans.

If you write a written book, you're gonna get slowed up by lawyers wanting to see what you say about this person, that person - I couldn't be bothered with it.

It's good to be in a position to know that I've inspired musicians, from what I've learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.

The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.

I was excited about opening for Vanilla Fudge because I was a big fan of theirs.

I can play in many sorts of categories because we've seen that with Led Zeppelin, all the acoustic stuff, and this, that and the other.

Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played... We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.

My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.

We weren't making money in the Yardbirds.

I prefer to hear an artist's work and what they can do, so as far as I'm concerned, I'd get a lot more out of a collection of songs to be able to understand what the musician is doing.

I really love playing live - it's such a gas.

Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.

John Peel made his reputation with his radio show and his record label, Dandelion, by championing the underdog.

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don't I? That is my characteristic, and it's my identity as you hear it.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.

I have one of those gravel-y voices with no range to it.

From meeting Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, teaming up, rehearsing, playing selected gigs outside of Britain, coming back into Olympic Studios to record the first album, and then going to America, which we crack open like a nut with the debut record - all that happened, literally, within months.

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.

Every album that I've attempted, I suppose, has been different - it's bound to be.

I don't really know anything about sales figures, to be honest with you.

The one person who's disappeared out of the business is the A&R man. Because the listener at home becomes the A&R man. He's the one who chooses what tracks he wants on the album. And that's cool.

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.

The album's not dead for me; I still buy vinyl albums.

We were lucky in the days of Led Zeppelin. Each album was different. We didn't have to continue a formula or produce a certain number of singles. Because, in those days, radio was still playing albums. That was really good.

I do not recall ever seeing Spirit perform live.

Our intent with Led Zeppelin was not to get caught up in the singles' market, but to make albums where you could really flex your muscles - your musical intellect, if you like - and challenge yourself.

There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.

So many people are frightened to take a chance in life and there's so many chances you have to take.

I have a voracious appetite for all things, worldly and unworldly.

Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.

I can communicate far better on a guitar than I can through my mouth.

If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn't it wonderful that we've got all that good medicine? I think it's got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That's what it is. It's got to be, hasn't it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn't let me down.

You can't overthink the music. Mood and intensity can't be manufactured. The blues isn't about structure; it's what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a speci?c moment is what drives it.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.