Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Music is a saviour for me.
Save your tears, you've got years.
You do some crazy things when you're young.
I didn't have any aspirations to be famous at all.
Being on the road isn't hell - it's pure pleasure now.
I will be happy if I am 60 because I was not supposed to be 60.
As soon as I paid the mortgage off in 1988, I started racing cars.
Ferraris are lovely cars, but I just don't want to be seen in them.
I'd never intended to write a Christmas hit - I was a serious musician!
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway, oh no, this is the road to hell.
Rather than missing home when I'm on tour, I miss tour when I'm at home.
I actually, truly do love my family. It's not a public relations exercise.
That's why I've never made a live album - I can't bear listening to myself!
I have found out who are my real friends, thanks to the illness and hospitals.
The Italian side of my family were gypsies, and we are little hard so-and-sos.
That is the music that I have always wanted to play: real, genuine guitar music.
I've always felt that if people just came to one of my gigs, all would be revealed.
The thing that frustrated me is that some people think success is all measured by money.
Back in 1997, I got to race a Ferrari at the famous Monza circuit in Italy - a dream come true.
It's impossible for a couple to bring up two children without having lots and lots of arguments.
I made a lot of money, but you can dangerously let it lead you on. It depends what company you keep.
I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I'm not writing songs or gardening, I'm painting.
You can waste a whole lifetime Trying to be What you think is expected of you But youll never be free
It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.
After I got back my career and my artistic freedom in 1982, my golden rule is the music must never suffer.
I never got the chance to put drums on 'Watersigns,' because the company was in a rush to release it - and me.
I've given up my Ferrari - the idea of going through my village in a 488... You can't drive them on English roads.
Once I faced the fact I was going to deal with illness for the rest of my life, I got on with what I really wanted to do.
In a funny way, the illness spurred me on. I thought to myself, 'I've got to get through this operation to make a blues album.'
I think all the business stuff - the promotion, the hype, the high-power lunches, and the permanently injected smiles - is boring.
The operation left me very emotional. I cry a lot anyway. I've always been the type to feel hurt easily, but now I hit rock bottom.
My father used to control the wholesale of many ice-cream items in Middlesbrough. He was central distributor for most of the region.
My father's family were Italian ice cream men, and the knowledge was passed on, so I ran an ice cream van while I was dating my wife.
My heroes were gospel blues players like Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, not whoever was number one.
I'd become a corporate rock musician. I worked for 'Chris Rea.' He felt like another person. I even talked about him in the third person.
I was born in the overdub years. I wish there wasn't such a thing as a multitrack tape player, because what you heard would be the record.
None of my heroes were big rock stars, and I thought, 'This isn't how it's meant to be.' It wasn't about making music so much as selling it.
The record companies didn't want 'Stony Road,' and it ended up being a gold album. They didn't want 'Blue Guitars,' and we did 165,000 books.
You can't have F1 without Ferrari - you just can't have it. It's part of the theme that is the red car, and a lot of it is to do with the colour.
Nothing was ever clean enough for my father. You could never clean as good as he could; you could never clean as fast and as thorough as he could.
To say that losing your pancreas is a sad thing is not an overstatement. They had to take my pancreas away, my duodenum, and it's damaged for ever.
I think I've lost that ability to slow things down - that ability drivers have to calculate what's coming by you at tremendous speed. I used to have it.
Touring is easy. My wife will be with me a lot of the time. We get spoilt rotten, and all I have to do is go on stage in wonderful places and play music.
I'm never happy with anything I've done! If you sat me down and played everything I've ever recorded, I'd just sit there going, 'No... that could be better.'
I've had nine major operations in ten years. A lot of it is to do with something called retroperitoneal fibrosis, where the internal tissues attack each other.
I live halfway between London and the airport, which means I can operate my European career and get home every night. It costs a lot of money, but it's worth it.
Dad was a distant figure, autonomous, a cross between the Pope and Mussolini. He was very Italian, as were all of my uncles, although they were second generation.
When I was young, I wanted, most of all, to be a writer of films and film music. But Middlesbrough in 1968 wasn't the place to be if you wanted to do movie scores.
'Course, 'Santini' bombed in England, y'know. It came out at the height of the New Wave, which couldn't have been a worse time for a solo singer trying to sell rock melodies.
Eric Clapton's scales - when he comes off a high note and it's time for a refrain or a little bit of a rest, he peals off scales going downwards that are so good it's unbelievable.