I believe that people want to hear good songs and they want to be moved.

I believe that most people aren't that different from one another. Although we might appear to be different on the surface, I think ultimately we all go through the same struggles.

I write very personal songs. Subject matter is usually derived from some internal struggle that I am having.

I don't worry so much about whether people are buying my music or getting it for free.

The most important thing is writing songs that resonate and giving people a chance to listen to them.

I just try to stay honest with myself and in doing that I feel like the songs are going to resonate.

When I deal with my struggles in my songs, I feel like most people are going to identify with my struggles because they are essentially dealing with the same things.

In many ways my writing is like therapy. It is my way of dealing with things.

When I think about my career and how it all started, it really started with me getting to a point where I understood how to write songs that resonated with people.

I think people just want to hear good songs and I just want to keep getting better as a writer so that I can deliver good songs.

Athens, much like Austin, is a difficult music scene. There are so many musicians there that it is hard to get gigs and hard for people to take you seriously.

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

Unshed tears leave a deposit on your heart. Eventually they form a crust around it and paralyze it, the way mineral deposits paralyze a washing machine.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

We care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.

I love Mayberry! The people here are wonderful! When I'm at the grocery store people come up and hug me. Friends pick me up and take me for rides on the Blue Ridge Parkway and I always love that.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

If there is any selfish angle, then it would probably be me just knocking myself in the head, thinking "Is there anybody here? Am I still able to communicate with other musicians?"

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.

I've gone through a lot of stuff in my life.

From the moment [Bob] Dylan arrived as a songwriter, he was [so] much better than everybody else around.