Carlos Santana

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

The more choices we give patients affected by depression, the better we will serve them.

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

Every day you wake up is an opportunity to go beyond, and that 's why I let my band go right now. For the first time in my life I'm just roaming around, vagabonding.

I have come to the conclusion - and I don't know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I'm here now - that a lot of people tell me they don't get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.

I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

I'm ready to do something with Lady Gaga or Andrea Bocelli. I'm really grateful that nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.

Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain... you hear them and they're affixed to you.

I know I'm not the kind of person who's gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock 'n' roll artists. They just play their hits and that's it. That doesn't appeal to me.

I'm laughing because I know the secret of life. And the secret of life is that I have validated my existence. I know that I am worth more than my house, my bank account, or any physical thing.

KISS is Las Vegas entertainment. A musician doesn't need the mask.

A lot of people said to me, 'Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!'

Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling.

The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It's more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.

When a baby comes you can smell two things: the smell of flesh, which smells like chicken soup, and the smell of lilies, the flower of another garden, the spiritual garden.

Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, 'Oh man, this is the stuff.' It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling.

When you fly to New York, sometimes they put you on hold and you just go round and around in a holding pattern. Sometimes in a concert, I feel other spirits in a holding pattern that they want to land through my heart and through my fingers.

Stay in your heart.

No one's better than me. I'm not better than anyone. Whether it's Eric Clapton or BB King we look straight at each other. And that keeps it real.