Gary Moore

“There was a great blues scene in Belfast during the late '60s.”

“A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.”

“When you get into the habit of leaving a space, you become a much better player for it. If you've got an expressive style, and can express your emotions through your guitar, and you've got a great tone, it creates a lot of tension for the audience. It's all down to the feel thing.”

“I really want to concentrate of the blues again and do it properly, which is something I feel I didn't do before.”

“These guitar institutes and things like that, I think they take away people's identity and they're actually encouraging a lot of people to play who are not naturally good players anyway, but they're telling people that anyone can learn to play.”

“I'm not as a studied, technically, as you might think. My technique has really evolved naturally over the years from watching other guitarists and trying to develop my own style.”

“If you take a long time over a record, you end up making something different from what you intended.”

“I found reading musical notation frightfully boring.”

“I remember seeing The Who at the Top Hat.”

“Most musicians make the same record every time, and that's fine. But the people I respected when I was growing up, like Jeff Beck - they weren't afraid to try something new.”

“When I'm playing I get completely lost in it and I'm not even aware of what I'm doing with my face - I'm just playing.”

“I think that a lot of people are going so wrong by analysing music too much and learning from a totally different perspective from the way I learned. I mean, I just learned by listening to people. People I learned from learned by listening to people.”

“As time has gone on I've felt less and less need to play too many notes. That's something you do when you're younger, you play far too much and too fast.”

“Most of the bands that come out of L.A. now have singers that all sound like Daffy Duck.”

“When we came to America before, we opened shows in arenas for groups like Rush. It's always been a case of playing for 45 minutes for someone else's audience.”

“I always think it would be great to play clubs again, and then when I do I don't like it because I just feel sometimes it's a bit too intimate.”

“The blues needs to be everything to you, otherwise it's not going to come across. That's what I think.”

“I sang a song called 'Sugar Time.' That was it. I had the bug.”

“Obviously I don't play the same way as Peter, but I could do a passable imitation of Peter Green; if you gave me a guitar I could sit here and probably get closer than anybody else.”

“I didn't want to end up in Hollywood having facelifts and my hair dyed blond so I could appear on my own album cover.”