“When I look at you girl, I see a true work of art. So many beautiful things coming in one little heart.”

If you have the courage and you have the heart, that hero just might be you.

But Buddy was an upper. He was happy. He loved music, and he was really happy. I don’t know…

That was part of where Chet and I had problems, so I take complete blame for that.

I sat at a bar having a beer trying to hold down the stool.

They got me for possession of something that was long, long gone.

Country music isn’t a guitar, it isn’t a banjo, it isn’t a melody, it isn’t a lyric. It’s a feeling.

When you’re down in Texas, Bob Wills is still the king.

The men who could not fight, in a war that didn’t seem right. You let them come home, America.

Is your head up your ass so far that you can’t pull it out?

The rock and roll spirit. I learned a lot of that because I worked with Buddy Holly. I played bass with him, and he taught me a lot about that.

I love Johnny Cash, and I respect Johnny Cash. He’s the biggest. He’s like an Elvis in this business, but no, he’s never been the rebel.

Mainly what I learned from Buddy… was an attitude. He loved music, and he taught me that it shouldn’t have any barriers to it.

I’ve always felt that blues, rock ‘n’ roll and country are just about a beat apart.

Cuz I was never pretty anyway and never cared anything about that.

It was all devastating. I’d never dealt with losing anyone close to me, and I didn’t know where to put it in my life.

His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

Oh what we see when we finally stop looking.

Everything is about to disappear. You’ve got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.