Don't let your children take priority over your marriage and your work and everything else.

I don't feel like God called me to be a Gospel singer. He didn't call me to be a Christian singer, he called me to be a country singer, and I just happen to be a Christian.

Look to the Heavens, you can look to the skies. You can find redemption staring back into your eyes.

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.

I'm normally the guy that stands off in the corner.

Singing allowed me to express myself in ways that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

I've found throughout the years that I needed a place where I can go with no TV, no computer, no phone and just have no distractions and just be able to sit and think and just not be disturbed.

It's hard sometimes to capture magic when it comes to live records.

I grew up going to a real small missionary baptist church. We would sing a lot of the old standards... the hymns and everything. Those songs are still my favorite and are pretty timeless.

'Firecracker' was such a fun song to write and to perform.

I've never had the patience of a teacher.

Letting him goThere is a particular kind of suffering to be experienced when you love something greater than yourself. A tender sacrifice. Like the pained silence felt in the lost song of a mermaid

feminism is for everybody

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.

We can't fight and beg from those we fight at the same time.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

The acquirement and enjoyment of physical well-being, mental calm and spiritual peace are priceless to their possessors.

We humans are more concerned with having than with being.

Five minutes after we die, we'll know exactly how much we should have given rather than kept.

Well, it was the beginning of my film career. It was amazing to me that I got nominated for an Academy Award.