The last 16 years of my daddys life, he got to work for me, and that made him his own boss and he like that.

I am who I am, I am what I am, I do what I do and I ain't never gonna do it any different. I don't care who likes it and who don't.

I got to realizing that I wanted to record, I wanted to experiment. And doing those same old songs the same old way - I said, 'I think it's time for me to have some fun.'

I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.

I remember as a kid being cold a lot, and hungry sometimes. Wed go to bed with just cornbread and milk, and I remember wearing shoes with holes in the bottom. I remember having twine for shoestrings.

I've got the hungries for your love and I'm waiting in your welfare line.

If you want me in the Hall of Fame put me in because of some contributions that I have made to country music.

I'd like to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs and had a hell of a time.

The biggest fool to hit the big time and all I've got to do is act naturally.

I'm in an absolute frenzy towards doing as many things as I can that I want to do today. The rest can wait till tomorrow, next week, if I'm around we'll take a look.

My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.

In a society as broken as ours, "antisocial" behavior is the only behavior worth defending.

Very possibly this was the night my white-knight complex, as Solange put it, would get me killed. Someone had better write a poem about it. It was only fair.

I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

Ascetic spirituality is a symptom of the very disease which it intends to cure.

...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologise than it is to get permission.

Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

I am one of those authors who believes (perhaps foolishly) that she is in complete control of the story.

The eyes see not what is before them when the mind is intent on other matters.