Top 236 Quotes & Sayings by Jimmy Page - Page 3

All my houses are isolated. Many is the time I just stay home alone.

Once I get onstage the tension explodes and I'm fine. I'm in another world - in a trance almost, doing what I love best, expressing myself through guitar.

My favorite guitar solo of all time was Elliot Randall's on `Reelin' In The Years'.

That's the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I'd always hoped that she'd work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she's able to look at something that's happened to her, draw back and crystallize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It's bloody eerie. I can relate so much to what she says. "Now old friends are acting strange/They shake their heads/They say I've changed."

Crowley didn't have a very high opinion of women, and I don't think he was wrong.

If you are on to something creative, school can also inhibit you. The wrong teacher, man, can really mess you up.

Let's just say I'm like a ship passing through storms, resting in ports now and then until it's time to continue the journey. I once told a friend, `I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing - one that couldn't fly away.'

I deal in emotions. It's the harmonic side that's important. That's the side I expected to be much further along on than I am now. That just means to say that I've got to keep at it.

We kept moving forward and didn't try to recreate the past .. the approach to each album was radically different every time. Many bands would have some success and, because they were locked into having a single - something we didn't have to worry about - they had to make sure there was something similar on the next album ... that was never the idea with Led Zeppelin .. the goal was to keep that spark of spontaneity at all times.

Music can always be a life-changing experience, for musicians and fans, or at least life-affecting, but it depends on to what degree.

I'm attracted by the unknown, but I take precautions.

Artists say that paintings are never done. I sort of feel the same way about music. I would never say something is perfect. There are performances that can generate a lot of emotion in me when I hear them, but I can't say if anything is perfect.

There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin. John Bonham, phenomenal drummer, young man with his technique, but do you think he would ever have the opportunity to play like that in another band? Of course he hadn't.

The way I see it, rock & roll is folk music. Street music. It isn't taught in school. It has to be picked up.

I'm not afraid of death. That is the greatest mystery of all. That'll be it, that one. But it is all a race against time.

I don't care what critics and other people think.

I don't want to get too dippy about all this. If you take the view of the scientist and everything is in a state of vibration, then every note is a vibration, which has a certain frequency, and you know that if you put 40 beats into a frequency it's going to be the same note every time. You take that into infrasound and people can be made to be sick, actually killed. Taking it the other way, not to be too depressing, what about euphoria, etc., and what about consciousness being totally... no, I won't go into that one. Time warps.

I'm not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I'm turned on to... if people want to find things, they find them themselves.

This week, I'm a gypsy. Maybe next week it'll be glitter rock.

I'm still terrified of flying. I really have to get drunk to fly. I've found that I've developed fears I never had before... fears of heights, claustrophobia... only in cities, though, never in the country.

There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That's a personal point of view but that's the way I see it. I think that's what it's all about. The drive, the fire, the passion - it all comes out on the guitar.

A lot of people can't be on their own. They get frightened. Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn't teach it in school.

You can't expect to be the same person you were three years ago. Some people expect you to be and can't come to terms with the fact that if a year has elapsed between LPs, that means one year's worth of changes. The material consequently is affected by that, the lyrics are affected by that... the music too.

I've never regretted anything I've ever done.

The greatest satisfaction is not the decoration. It is knowing that I am able to help someone who needs help.

My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.

You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

I'm at my best when I'm exhausted and under pressure.

I do really believe that all guitarists have a different character that comes through, that's a strong character, the stronger the person is.

You can't just find yourself doing something and not happy doing it.

Domesticity and all that isn't really for me.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

If you're working at the factory and you're cursing every day that you get up, at all costs get out of it. You'll just make yourself ill.

I'm still searching for an angel with a broken wing. It's not very easy to find them these days.

I do not worship the devil. But magic does intrigue me. Magic of all kinds. I bought Crowley's house to go up and write in. The thing is, I just never get up that way. Friends live there now.

Well, Led Zeppelin IV! That's it really. I'll tell you why the album had no title - because we were so fed up with the reactions to the third album, that people couldn't understand why that record wasn't a direct continuation of the second album. And then people said we were a hype and all, which was the furthest thing from what we were. So we just said, `let's put out an album with no title at all!' That way, either people like it or they don't... but we still got bad reviews!

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

When I went over to the States to promote Outrider, everyone was telling me I was a blues guitarist. I'm not a bloody blues guitarist. I'm a guitarist.

I spend a lot of time near water.

There's so much that can be done on the guitar. And that's what is so good about the guitar - everyone can really enjoy themselves on it and have a good time, which is what it's all about.

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing.

I'm trying to photosynthesize like a plant. I'm off eating. Although I am making a lot of banana daiquiries in my room in the blender I've got, with lots of powdered vitamins in them. This tour I'm going to get some Afghani hangings and put them in my room, so that my hotel rooms look like mosques.

I can tell how far I ought to be going, I know how to get there, all I've got to do is keep playing.

There's a very old recording maxim that goes, 'Distance makes depth.' I've used that a hell of a lot-whether it's tracking guitars or the whole band. People are used to close-miking amps, but I'd have a mic out around the back, as well, and then balance the two. Also, you shouldn't have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound right. You should be able to get the right tones simply with the science of microphone placement.

I'm not a guitarist as far as a technician goes, I just pick it up and play it. Technique doesn't come into it.

Led Zeppelin didn't get that kind of Beatles screaming. We had a more sort of macho crowd. But I remember once in the early days of The Yardbirds, we were playing on an ice rink, and the stage was mobbed by screaming girls. I had my clothes torn off me. That's a really uncomfortable experience, let me tell you.

I don't go walking into things blind.

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia.

Many people think of me as just a riff guitarist, but I think of myself in broader terms. As a musician I think my greatest achievement has been to create unexpected melodies and harmonies within a rock and roll framework. And as a producer I would like to be remembered as someone who was able to sustain a band of unquestionable individual talent, and push it to the forefront during its working career. I think I really captured the best of our output, growth, change and maturity on tape - the multifaceted gem that is Led Zeppelin.

If you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing ... so it didn't matter what other bands were doing ... we did what we were doing.

I don't know whether I'll reach 40. I don't know whether I'll reach 35. I can't be sure about that. I am bloody serious. I am very, very serious. I didn't think I'd make 30.

So far I've been very, very fortunate because it appears that people like to hear the music I like to play. What more fortunate position can a musician be in?

No. I usually rest in my satin-lined coffin, actually. I'm not allowed out in daylight hours.

From the classical guitar right through to the furthest electrical experiments and everything in-between, it's amazing what the guitar can actually do. I mean, when one thinks about sounds.

I know where I'm going musically. I can see my pattern and I'm going much slower than I thought I'd be going.

The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.

We were never a band that did 96 takes of the same thing. I had heard of groups that were into that kind of excess around that time. They'd work on the same track for three or four days and then work on it some more, but that's clearly not the way to record an album. If the track isn't happening and it creates some sort of psychological barrier, even after an hour or two, then you should stop and do something else. Go out: go to the pub, or a restaurant or something. Or play another song.

We went in and recorded exactly where we were at that point in time. I think because of the quality of musicianship of the band has given it the longevity. I thought the music would endure, I didn't think I would ... I always thought I'd be dead by 30, then dead by 40 and on and on. Now I'm 55 so I didn't even die at 50.

Seeing people's faces, really getting off on them, makes me incredibly happy. Genuinely.