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.

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.

Simplicity can intensify the emotion.

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.

Authors have to help each other out. It isn't a competition

I am a hot-blooded fire and I am fearless.

O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Next time someone tells you 'never,' remember that means 'not for at least one hour.'

There is no so wretched and coarse a soul wherein some particular faculty is not seen to shine.

I always wanted to make aliens that looked like '60s aliens.

Most suits made the man. Gideon did things to a three-piece suit that should've been illegal.

The low-ceiling price bazaar for sexual relief was a street called Middie Alley. You could barely get a pushcart through this avenue. Top price-twenty-five cents.

It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.