I could not live without the guitar, but at the same time this is no way of life, because it is such a difficult instrument, so ungrateful; you dedicate your whole life to it, hours and days, and suddenly you come up on stage, and that day you feel in perfect shape for playing, and still you don’t hit one single string right, and you cannot figure out why… it depends on so many things, on how long your fingernails are… I am talking about tenths of millimeters, and you ask yourself. What is going on? Where am I failing? And it could be a badly polished nail… it’s a f*cker of an instrument.
Once I was drunk, in New York, and I went up on stage in a jazz club to play the electric guitar, and when I got down my nails were all broken by the steel strings …and now …never again.
Snippet from an interview in the Nineties.
http://www.guitarplayer.com/archive/0604/0604_Features4.htm
Had you seen this more recent interview with Paco?