Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.

Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.

Even on the most serious ballads, I'll throw in a tongue-in-cheek remark.

Anytime you do something from the heart, people just know it.

You can't kill it with goodbye; It always finds a place to hide inside your heart for your whole life. Love is never-ending.

I hope I'm at least half the dad that he didn't have to be.

You look out there and there's people that, their day is changed because of your contribution to it.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

If there's a song where there's a possibility of guitar stuff that would be fun to listen to, go for it. Don't worry about what anybody thinks.

I love any and all situations where you celebrate creativity.

As a guitar player, it's harder for me to impress somebody than it is to write a song that they like.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Don't be too obvious about it.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

Son, what kind of pitch would you like to miss?

I think sometimes we give people a lot of credit just because they're writing nice sentences even if it isn't adding up to much.

You look back on films sometimes and if they have not been as all-out successful as you anticipated you try to find reasons why maybe it didn't come off for audiences as well as you would have liked.

You kill people you hate or you kill in rage or you kill to get even, but you don't kill someone you're indifferent to.

A pile of bills and statements - whether paid or not - is a sign that someone is clueless about what's coming in and going out.