29 Quotes by Chet Atkins

...Everyone has their own sound, and if you're heard enough, folks will come to recognize it. Style however, is a different thing. Try to express your own ideas. It's much more difficult to do, but the rewards are there if you're good enough to pull it off ...

When I was a little boy, I told my dad, 'When I grow up, I want to be a musician.' My dad said: 'You can't do both, Son'.

Years from now, after I’m gone, someone will listen to what I’ve done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they’ll hear my guitars speaking for me.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

Approach your guitar intelligently, and if there are limits, don’t deny them. Work within your restrictions. Somethings you can do better than others, some things you can’t do as well. So accentuate the positive.

It took me 20 years to learn I couldn’t tune too well. And by that time I was too rich to care.

I’ll always be poor in my mind.

A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can’t give you a formula for that.

It takes a lot of devotion and work, or maybe I should say play, because if you love it, that’s what it amounts to I haven’t found any shortcuts, and I’ve been looking for a long time.