Jimmy Page Quotes

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

I spend a lot of time near water.

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

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.

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?

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.

Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

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.

When I started doing sessions, the guitar was in vogue. I was playing solos every day.

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.'

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

There's a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term "genius," but you're treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there's a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go.

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

You don't find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn't mean to say you can't be really good.

There's music that can affect people in their lives, and they will always relate to the point that they heard it and experienced it, either if you're playing it or you're receptive, as an audience.

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

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'

Live Aid did feel like one hour's rehearsal after several years, but to be part of Live Aid was wonderful. It reall was.

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.

The element of change has been the thing, really. We put out the first one, then the second... then a third LP totally different from them. It's the reason we were able to keep it together.

Sometimes, I must admit, I'd like to have a second guitarist onstage with me, but it wouldn't look right. I'd like to play for another 20 years, but I don't know... I just can't see it happening. I don't know why. It's a certain foreboding... a funny feeling... vultures.

Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.

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.

There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They're very, very precious to me.

I don't like to tell people what format they can get things in, or say, "I'm only going to release this on vinyl and nothing else. You have to come to my world." I don't like to say that to people either. But, I do think there's a loss of romance.

But if you want me to knock Kingdom Come, all I will say is that I heard the guitarist said he'd never heard my playing, and I'd defy any guitarist in American not to have heard Led Zeppelin.

I had another idea of getting a traveling medicine wagon with a dropdown side and traveling around England. That might sound crazy to you, but over there it's so rural you can do it. Just drop down the side and play through big battery amps and mixers and it can all be as temporary or as permanent as I want it to be.

I don't feel I have to top myself at all.

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.

I really wasn't needed... Just straightening up riffs, that's all. Just two guitarists doing it instead of one.

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.

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 felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

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

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

You can't buy time. Everything, for me, seems to be a race against time. Especially musically.

I don't go walking into things blind.

I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.

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

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.

You get as much out of rock & roll artistically as you put into it. There's nobody who can teach you. You're on your own and that's what I find so fascinating about it.

My guitar style was developed during that 10-year period. That's me. That's the way I play, and I don't wish to play any other way. Our own individual identities are firmly stamped on this album.

Once I got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you're playing an instrument that is really hard.