I’m really terrible with small children; they’re small, noisy, irritating, damp and soggy. – Ian Anderson
I make up my own mind in light of available facts, with my own experience and a sense of personal ethics. – Ian Anderson
I was not a great guitarist, so I sold my 1960 Fender Stratocaster in exchange for a Shure Microphone, made in Chicago, and a flute. – Ian Anderson
If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim. – Ian Anderson
I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It’s there to be a museum showcase of all that’s great about American music. – Ian Anderson
I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green. – Ian Anderson
I think we always view people who make us feel uncomfortable and appear to intrude on our middle-class cozy space, we view them with, if not hostility, at least suspicion, discomfort, embarrassment. – Ian Anderson
When I was in my teenage years, I went to sign up as a cadet entrant to the police force but was at the very last moment rejected, just as I was about to sign my name on the dotted line. I won’t get into why that happened, but it was a moment where it could’ve been predetermined then that I was off to become a policeman. – Ian Anderson
There’s always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It’s how you lend some authority to what you write – you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little. – Ian Anderson
Prog didn’t really go away. Just took a catnap in the late Seventies. A new generation of fans discovered it, and a whole new array of bands and solo artists took it on into the new millennium. – Ian Anderson
I’m all in favor of banks that play their part in community endeavors, private individuals looking for loans, people who want to start up a little business, and that’s what banks are for. – Ian Anderson
I can never make up my mind if I’m happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton. – Ian Anderson
In most cases, my favorite Jethro Tull songs will be determined by how I feel about them as live performance songs, not by the recorded identity. – Ian Anderson
When I was a teenager, I really didn’t like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I’ve always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute. – Ian Anderson
All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar. – Ian Anderson
The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players. – Ian Anderson
I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could’ve gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts. – Ian Anderson
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame traditionally has had a management style that is very supportive of American talent, first and foremost, over everything else. And I think that’s right and proper. – Ian Anderson
I don’t think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again. – Ian Anderson
I was always more interested in the ultimate live performance rather than the recording for its own sake. And, for the audience too, that thrill of – just being there. – Ian Anderson
I think I’ve owned all the models of iPods so far. And these days between my iPod, iPhone and my personal laptop computer, I’m someone who is very, very grateful for all the ways to listen to music and completely switch off from people around me and listen to the music in detail, which is very hard to do if you’re in a room with other people. – Ian Anderson
As a musician, life is not over just because you are getting older, and so I find retirement a very frightening and dark thought. – Ian Anderson
We do hear perhaps too many accolades generally aimed at people like Steve Jobs. We have to remember that there are other classic things in life that we undervalue and take them for granted. If you think of the classic lines of the modern jet aircraft, it’s really been there since early World War II. – Ian Anderson
