Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I've written, are stories driven by characters.

If you want the rainbow you gotta put up with the rain.

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.

It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen.

If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one.

A peacock that rests on his feathers is just another turkey.

I'm on a seafood diet - I see food, I eat it.

I look just like the girls next door... if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.

We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.

He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

The cost of college education today is so high that many young people are giving up their dream of going to college, while many others are graduating deeply in debt.

I'm not sure that I'm really relevant as a director anymore. Or as a writer, either, to tell you the truth.

I like to give clues - titles - that can give a simple, evocative hook into what picture or feeling welled up in my mind when I came up with the song.

Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they're at an 8 instead of 9 or 10.

I think it's good that opportunity, like circumstances, can really affect what you do and you have no control over it.

Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.

We create our future, by well improving present opportunities: however few and small they are.

What single brave decision do I need to make today?

I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.