When you get married and have children, and you start having hits and success and your business starts growing, there's less and less time for songwriting.

I don't feel like God called me to be a Gospel singer. He didn't call me to be a Christian singer, he called me to be a country singer, and I just happen to be a Christian.

Look to the Heavens, you can look to the skies. You can find redemption staring back into your eyes.

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.

I'm normally the guy that stands off in the corner.

Singing allowed me to express myself in ways that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

I've found throughout the years that I needed a place where I can go with no TV, no computer, no phone and just have no distractions and just be able to sit and think and just not be disturbed.

It's hard sometimes to capture magic when it comes to live records.

I grew up going to a real small missionary baptist church. We would sing a lot of the old standards... the hymns and everything. Those songs are still my favorite and are pretty timeless.

'Firecracker' was such a fun song to write and to perform.

I've never had the patience of a teacher.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

My dad always told me that holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.

Success shouldn't be measured by how much you have but by how much you give back.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart

I believe that a man should be... as big as he feels it in him to be!

The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal.