“I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.”

The years rolled slowly past and I found myself alone. Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends, I found myself further and further from my home.

Every now and then you’ll nail one that’s really, really special. And that’s what you live for.

With only one thing in common, they got the fire down below.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I’m playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

He wants his home and security, he wants to live like a sailor at sea.

One victim lives in tragedy, another victim stops to stare, and still another walks on by pretending not to see

And you pretend it doesn’t bother you, When you just want to explode.

The two hours onstage is great. But I can only play a show and then take a night off. I have to sing for two hours, and then I’ve gotta rest it for a night. So it’s the other 46 hours that are just boring as heck.

Sometimes you can hear them talk, other times you can’t. All the same old cliches, is that a woman or a man?

I’m older now but still running against the wind

You go to LA, or you go to New York, and it’s really fun to go there. But they’re not grounded. Everybody is just competing all the time for the limelight. It’s too much entertainment industry. There are too many choices. And it’s distracting to me.

I’d rather make music than tour.

Tell them we’ll be dancing, dancing ’til we drop, it’s time to get down and do the Horizontal Bop.

It went on yesterday and it’s going on tonight, somewhere there’s somebody ain’t treatin’ somebody right.

It was 22 years of work in a row, right up until 1987. Twenty-two years in a row-either on tour, writing an album, or recording an album. It wasn’t until 1987 that I was able to take a breath.

She had been born with a face that would let her get away, he saw that face and he lost all control.

Kindness goes a long ways lots of times when it ought to stay at home.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

I hope to be on the scene for a long time. I’d love to be old and gray and still be working in this [horror] genre.

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass.

I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.

No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.