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1. When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn’t believe the sound. I said, ‘See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.’
2. If you ask me what I’d rather be doing, well, I’d rather be home in California, watching TV, polishing my tools and working around the ranch.
3. I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure or sensuality. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That’s what music does.
4. My aunt played the piano and I used to sit and listen to it.
5. I’ve been performing since 1955. I’m going to have to keep performing till I die because I’m not going to die in some rocking chair with a big ol’ beer belly.
6. Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.
7. I wanted to put a sheet in explaining what all the songs are about, but they didn’t do it.
8. I do not play to musicians. I play to the people.
9. I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs.
10. I refuse to bring my son up in a world corrupt as it is now.
11. What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They’re not your blood. They’re not your mind. You get in an argument.
12. I became stereotyped.
13. I used to surf up in Ventura County at Silver Strand; plus, I’ve played up there many times.
14. I like to say, ‘I hit every type of music in a show, and I play the people, not the instruments.’
15. Dick Dale don’t surf no more.
16. Surf music is actually just the sound of the waves played on a guitar: that wet, splashy sound.
17. I was reading a magazine when I was a little kid, probably about twelve years old, and an ad said that if you sell so many jars of Noxzema skin cream, we’ll sell you a ukulele. So I went out and banged on doors in the snow in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I was raised, and I sold the skin cream.
18. I try to read the audience, see what they’re in the mood for.
19. In the Shao Lin temple, they never allow you to touch the skin of a drum until you can tongue what you’re going to play.
20. I’ve never followed a list in my life, and that’s probably what has created so much nervous energy in my body.