“It’s only half past twelve but I don’t care, it’s 5 O’clock somewhere.”

When I was in high school, I don’t know that I really had big dreams.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

I always try to make the music that I like and think my fans will like.

I don’t write all my stuff.

I could have done a hundred songs, really.

“After 17” is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that’s kind of where I’m at in that part of my life.

I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn’t have when I was young.

It’s a scary word, ‘cancer.’

I like to write sad songs. They’re much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don’t want to hear them as much.

If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world.

I didn’t realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn’t even know that until a year or two ago.

I don’t see that it would be worth retiring.

Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age.

Somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.

I love your cooking, honey, but sometimes I need some real food.

I’m more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel.

I don’t care what your nose says! The last time you smelled half-blood, it turned out to be a meatloaf sandwich!” “Meatloaf sandwiches are good! But this is a half-blood scent, I swear. They are on board!” “Bah, your brain isn’t on board!

If you begin to consider yourself solely responsible to a political party, you’re half-way to a dictatorship.

Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it… that’s excellence.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

His finest hour lasted a minute and a half.

It’s kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion – the camera’s on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

I’m half Hawaiian and the haka is a very sacred thing, something your family teaches you – my father taught me.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.