Simplicity can intensify the emotion.

Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

When there are dogs and music, people have a good time.

Mediocrity is gonna kill the world before Armageddon ever does.

You have to grow up, start paying the rent and have your heart broken before you understand country.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

To me acting and singing are worlds apart.

I was feeling single, seeing double, wound up in a whole lotta trouble.

If I'm crazy, I'm blissfully so!

I do feel a little embarrassed and ashamed that I was sort of saying, "Oh, yes, I used to do country music, but I didn't inhale." Which is not true at all. I inhaled the hell out of country music.

When you're just singing a beautiful melody with a story that's true to the heart, you don't need a lot of embellishment.

Your attention is so sacred that if you truly look for beauty and grace, you will find it in everything.

The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.

Sometimes I'm tired simply means I need something new.

I do get a bit of a sense, just from e-mails some people send me, just a little sense of how people in different countries seem to respond differently to certain lines in a song.

I don't want you to trust me, I want you to question everything I say.

Minnesota has been so good to me and so pleased that I love Minnesota.

The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world

He who disguises tyranny, protection, or even benefits under the air and name of friendship reminds me of the guilty priest who poisoned the sacramental bread.

Well, I have a CBE and I accepted it with glee because it's not bestowed on you by the royal family, it's not bestowed on you by the government, you have to be nominated by the public.

Whenever people have trouble public speaking, it's because they are just thinking about themselves.