“Before I get out of bed, I am saying thank you. I know how important it is to be thankful.”

A very few minutes, because seven days later I was in the studio, and eight days later, I was no the stage.

You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

My dad graduated seminary there, and so did (sounds like) Mark Kimball’s grandfather. They sang in a quartet together, my dad and Mark Kimball’s grandfather.

The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes.

Let that get you up in the morning and put the light in your eyes. I’m telling you, it makes you a better husband, mother, father, neighbor, citizen.

I discovered is that I have a couple of valves that were leaky and had been giving, gave me a problem then. But I hadn’t noticed anything up until then.

Every day is Thanksgiving for me, man. Yeah, I still have an audience, and they ask the local promoter, “When is Al coming back?”

It’s all background experience and listening and exposure.

I would still be singing, because it’s part of my heart and my soul, and it lifts me up.

and I was listening. I started singing, warmer than a summer night, at seven or eight years old.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it’s not easy. You have to take direct steps.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career.

Every day is Thanksgiving.On this stage you’re going to hear God and none of them other words, and I ain’t going to touch my stuff.

Hopefully before I’m done, I can be on an Olympic team.

What we don’t realise when we watch a normal film is how many times someone has run in just before a shot quickly to wipe away that sweaty moustache.

My eventual goal is to win a championship. And before I retire, I just want to win a championship. That’s it.

And then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before. “Salutations!” said the voice. Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried. “Salutations!” repeated the voice.

Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.

What’s important is to listen before you react.

It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.