Top 40 David Gilmour Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you No one told you where to run, you missed the starting gun.”

— David Gilmour

2. “There’s no way out of here.”

— David Gilmour

3. “You know, once you’ve had that guitar up so loud on the stage, where you can lean back and volume will stop you from falling backward, that’s a hard drug to kick.”

— David Gilmour

4. “Jimi Hendrix isn’t as good as me!”

— David Gilmour

5. “I mean, I have moments of huge frustration because of my inability to express myself linguistically as clearly as I would like to.”

— David Gilmour

6. “It’s not true that you fall in love only once in your life. But it is true that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once.”

— David Gilmour

7. “Make life an art rather than art from life.”

— David Gilmour

8. “Everything in moderation – that’s what I live by.”

— David Gilmour

9. “God created a system which gave us freewill.”

— David Gilmour

10. “I think I’m still trying to be experimental on everything I ever do, but it’s not as obviously way-out and experimental as what we were.”

— David Gilmour

11. “I’m not interested in teaching books by women.”

— David Gilmour

12. “Where would rock and roll be without feedback?”

— David Gilmour

13. “I’m an atheist, and I don’t have any belief in an afterlife...”

— David Gilmour

14. “Well, I am David Gilmour, the voice and guitar of Pink Floyd. I have been since I was 21.”

— David Gilmour

15. “I don’t have a very disciplined approach to practicing or anything, but I do tend to have a guitar around most of the time, which I strum on most of the day.”

— David Gilmour

16. “The future is deterministic in principle, but not in practice.”

— David Gilmour

17. “It’s not whether God plays dice; it’s how God plays dice.”

— David Gilmour

18. “There is irreducible chance in the universe.”

— David Gilmour

19. “I don’t want to be a full-time member of Pink Floyd all my life.”

— David Gilmour

20. “I’ve been in The Who, I’ve been in The Beatles and I’ve been in Pink Floyd! Top that!”

— David Gilmour

21. “She was a stirrer of the pot, a lover of intrigue and distress, a creature who seemed to draw oxygen from the spectacle of people at each other’s throat, everybody in a state of upset and talking about her.”

— David Gilmour

22. “I think I could walk into any music shop anywhere and with a guitar off the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound just like me. There’s no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound.”

— David Gilmour

23. “No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend.”

— David Gilmour

24. “Yes, there’s a lot of the blues in my playing.”

— David Gilmour

25. “How much in life is determined, and how much is due to chance?”

— David Gilmour

26. “The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool’s game.”

— David Gilmour

27. “When intellectuals accept stereotypes, it is not surprising that other people do the same.”

— David Gilmour

28. “I’ve never had any religion. I’d prefer it if I did, really. Even as a boy I just couldn’t make myself believe.”

— David Gilmour

29. “I think Atom Heart Mother was a good thing to have attempted, but I don’t really think the attempt comes off that well.”

— David Gilmour

30. “I don’t live my life on the road. I’m getting on a bit and there’s a lot of other things in my life. Our lovely children and their lives. It’s more of a part-time business these days.”

— David Gilmour

31. “I don’t even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.”

— David Gilmour

32. “It’s a very tempting thing to try and relive your glory days when you get a little older and you worry that people have forgotten all about you.”

— David Gilmour

33. “I actually learned the guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instructional record when I was 13 or 14.”

— David Gilmour

34. “I have no interest in going on a tour to make money without making new product, new art.”

— David Gilmour

35. “If people would like to come to my concerts I’d love them to come. And if they like the music that I make, I love that too. But I do not make music for other people. I make it to please myself.”

— David Gilmour

36. “The expectation on me as a solo artist is very different to the audience’s expectation of a Pink Floyd show.”

— David Gilmour

37. “I just play intuitively and work the same way in the studio. I don’t have any magical effects or anything that helps me to get my particular sound.”

— David Gilmour

38. “I am a lover of all sorts of different music. I love blues and every piece of music that I have listened to has become an influence.”

— David Gilmour

39. “I’m English and I am British. I don’t know if I feel part of a music scene. Musically, I have as many feelings and affinity with Americans or Canadians, or all sorts of people as I do with English people.”

— David Gilmour

40. “I can remember a lot of nights performing in those early years where you felt that you hit some good moments, but a lot of the time you’re thinking, “Oh, God, this isn’t quite making it.” So I think that is what makes you in the end refine your view of things a little bit.”

— David Gilmour

41. “I am working on current material, a new album, and that is all still my main motivation of going out and working. We haven’t gotten rid of all the new stuff in favor of the old.”

— David Gilmour

42. “Being a solo artist is what I do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years and a bit before then.”

— David Gilmour

43. “It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.”

— David Gilmour

44. “We already had all the songs, and it turns out all you have to do is burn them to some CDs, so why not?”

— David Gilmour

45. “It’s crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.”

— David Gilmour

46. “When I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.”

— David Gilmour

47. “For me, gradually over the years, you refined your tastes in the way you do things and it becomes maybe less experimental.”

— David Gilmour

48. “I can’t remember really what it’s like to do it within Pink Floyd. In my mind, that’s a thing of the past.”

— David Gilmour