Do you want to be successful? Nurture your talent.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that.

I tell you, I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockers!

Sixteen Tons was written eight years before I recorded it.

Know yourself -- and know your audience.

When you do a show five days a week and one night a week, the way I was doing, you use up so much music every day that pretty soon you find yourself hustling for material.

You can't cheat the public for long.

Shot Gun Boogie, I wanted wedding bells. I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.

If you see me coming, better step aside. A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died.

You can keep rummaging around until you find a song you like, but you can't predict whether it'll hit or not.

True vice, my lady, would frighten us all, if it did not wear the mask of virtue. (p.56)

Success is not what you have done compared to what others have done. Success is what you have done compared to what you were supposed to do.

The irony of seeking a shrink: they are successful in shrinking your brain but unfortunately they also make your wallet shrink.

I will not move an inch

God is no enemy to you. He asks no more than that He hear you call Him "Friend."

It is simpler and easier to flatter men than to praise them.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

Who are next to knaves? Those that converse with them.

I live a generally quiet life, as it were.

The art of moving forward lies in understanding what to leave behind.