Top 100 Eric Clapton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When all the original blues guys are gone, you start to realize that someone has to tend to the tradition. I recognize that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive, and it’s a pretty honorable position to be in.”

— Eric Clapton

52. “One summer I remember, I got exposed to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Buddy Holly was a very very big, made a very big impression on me. Because of a lot of things, you know, the way he looked and his charisma.”

— Eric Clapton

53. “My original interests and intentions in guitar playing were primarily created on quality of tone, for instance, the way the instrument could be made to echo or simulate the human voice.”

— Eric Clapton

54. “There are people these days who can do things on the guitar which are beyond my reach. There’s one guy who plays with Queen who can do things I would dream of doing. I sincerely mean that.”

— Eric Clapton

55. “I’d love to knock an audience cold with one note, but what do you do for the rest of the evening?”

— Eric Clapton

56. “It’s very dependent on your state of mind. And your emotional state as well. And a lot of it comes pouring out, you don’t really have that much control with it.”

— Eric Clapton

57. “I used to do crazy things that people would bail me out of, and I’m just grateful that I survived. But the music got very lost; I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t really care. I was more into just having a good time, and I think it showed.”

— Eric Clapton

58. “They found our hero in the gutter with a diamond ring and a gun.”

— Eric Clapton

59. “From the beginning, I knew intuitively that if nothing else, music was safe, and that nobody could tell me anything about it. Music didn’t need a middleman, whereas all the other things in school needed some kind of explanation.”

— Eric Clapton

60. “I mean, it didn’t matter to me that there were people, it didn’t matter that I was shy Just the sound was so captivating that it helped me to get rid of those inhibitions.”

— Eric Clapton

61. “I can’t play long solos anymore without boring myself.”

— Eric Clapton

62. “I just like the company of beautiful women. I have a weakness in that department. And I suppose because I am fairly well off and a famous musician, I’m up for grabs. And that makes me an eligible bachelor in the press.”

— Eric Clapton

63. “Up until I became a father, it was all about self-obsession. But then I learned exactly what it’s all about: the delight of being a servant.”

— Eric Clapton

64. “Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it’s all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.”

— Eric Clapton

65. “Musically, he was like an old man in a boy’s skin.”

— Eric Clapton

66. “I mean, the sound of an amplified guitar in a room full of people was so hypnotic and addictive to me, that I could cross any kind of border to get on there.”

— Eric Clapton

67. “The music scene as I look at it today is a little different from when I was growing up. The percentages are roughly the same – 95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure.”

— Eric Clapton

68. “Very much like that, and very much a loner, do you know and I didn’t fit really into sport or all kind of group activities as a kid, I couldn’t find a niche. And music was not really part of the kind of village curriculum it would, you know.”

— Eric Clapton

69. “I just like the company of beautiful women. I have a weakness in that department.”

— Eric Clapton

70. “In playing, I suppose my greatest gift was to express the way I felt or the willingness to express myself.”

— Eric Clapton

71. “I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.”

— Eric Clapton

72. “To sing in a lower key is harder work. You have to use your diaphragm more.”

— Eric Clapton

73. “You were at school and you were pimply and no one wanted to know you. You get into a group and you’ve got thousands of chicks there.”

— Eric Clapton

74. “I remember when I thought of singing as the bit that went between the guitar playing – something I couldn’t wait to get out of the way. Singing was originally like a chore that I didn’t really enjoy.”

— Eric Clapton

75. “But the guitar, when you think about it, is the most versatile, really. I mean you can pick it up and take it with you wherever you go.”

— Eric Clapton

76. “It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.”

— Eric Clapton

77. “Although they can do it all the time, you know, they’re far better than me, on a musically, on a theoretical music level. You know, they’re out of my league.”

— Eric Clapton

78. “But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.”

— Eric Clapton

79. “I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me – it resonated.”

— Eric Clapton

80. “It’s taken me to be an older guy, an old man, to have an old man’s voice. Because I only liked old men’s voices. As a kid, I didn’t like pip-squeaked singers.”

— Eric Clapton

81. “The only planning I do is about a minute before I play. I desperately try to think of something that will be effective, but I never sit down and work it out note for note.”

— Eric Clapton

82. “So there I was in Hollywood, thinking I was doing good.”

— Eric Clapton

83. “I never met Johnny Rotten, and I didn’t want to meet Johnny Rotten.”

— Eric Clapton

84. “Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me.”

— Eric Clapton

85. “The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn’t really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.”

— Eric Clapton

86. “It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.”

— Eric Clapton

87. “I don’t know if I believe in luck. I think I’m very fortunate.”

— Eric Clapton

88. “I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn’t seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it.”

— Eric Clapton

89. “Loose ladies on the road will drive you crazy, every no, becomes a maybe.”

— Eric Clapton

90. “And if I don’t be there by morning, she’ll know that I must’ve spent the night in jail.”

— Eric Clapton

91. “This moment in time, on this tour, you know, I’m discovering a lot of new things. And to be 45 and doing that, it’s a mixture of pleasure and pain, I can assure you.”

— Eric Clapton

92. “A British pressing with a compilation of the best stuff really, I mean actually not only that but, these were all kind of semi hits for the people on it in America.”

— Eric Clapton

93. “I feel a real need to observe a level of propriety in what I’m handing out. Instead of me just venting or spilling my guts, I’ve got to consider how it’s going to affect people. How it’s going to affect me, as well. Because it’s like a cycle.”

— Eric Clapton

94. “I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious.”

— Eric Clapton

95. “Oh yeah, I mean, it wasn’t a very good guitar, most good guitars have got thrust rods in the necks that you can adjust or that’ll keep them in shape, you know keep them straight. This one just, well it turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months.”

— Eric Clapton

96. “They looked great, you know the drawings of the guys playing looked great and bits of string around their necks. So it didn’t seem to be that difficult a thing to do, or that inaccessible.”

— Eric Clapton

97. “Yeah, it is, because it’s a real discovery of your inner resources, you know. That’s what my character is all about and what my playing is all about. But to get up there and just go inside and draw out something that makes you feel good first and foremost.”

— Eric Clapton

98. “The toughest thing about being a celebrity, I suppose, is being polite when I don’t want to be.”

— Eric Clapton

99. “When I was in Nashville, Tennessee in 1970 with Derek and the Dominoes, I went into this shop and they had a rack of Strats and Teles – all going for $100.00 each. I bought a handfull and made Blackie out of the body from one, the neck from another, and so on.”

— Eric Clapton

100. “The first band I identified with from Chicago was the Muddy Waters band.”

— Eric Clapton