I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

I tell you, I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockers!

Sixteen Tons was written eight years before I recorded it.

Know yourself -- and know your audience.

When you do a show five days a week and one night a week, the way I was doing, you use up so much music every day that pretty soon you find yourself hustling for material.

You can't cheat the public for long.

Do you want to be successful? Nurture your talent.

Shot Gun Boogie, I wanted wedding bells. I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.

If you see me coming, better step aside. A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died.

You can keep rummaging around until you find a song you like, but you can't predict whether it'll hit or not.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

May they rest in eternal peace.

I think that social media can be used for good and for bad.

If you've got $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, you're better off paying off any debt you have because that's a guaranteed return.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

People don't realize where unsweet tea came from. During the war they had to ration sugar, so then everybody just had to drink bitter tea, or unsweet.

Dip your pen into your arteries and write.