“Young kids are doing the same thing I did, but they’re doing it differently. They don’t do brain surgery the way they used to do it either.”
“Whiskey’s to tough, Champagne costs too much, Vodka puts my mouth in gear. I hope this refrain, Will help me explain, As a matter of fact, I like beer.”
“The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn’t been any such thing.”
“I have had hundreds of people work for me over the years, and I don’t think I ever fired anybody.”
“I love winners when they cry, losers when they try.”
“The first time with artistic endeavors is, if it’s working, it was your idea, and if it’s not, it’s somebody else’s idea.”
“I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.”
“I never hid out. I was never big enough a star.”
“I was quite a reader before I became a writer.”
“I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.”
“This generation should entertain this generation. It’s only fair. When I was a kid, I mowed the lawn. Now, somebody else’s kid can mow the lawn.”
“I have my own religion. I’m sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish.”
“I’m a very comfortable and happy-go-lucky old man. I never wanted to be great, because I’d just get worried.”
“If Barbara Walters was interviewing me, I’d figure her career was as dead as mine!”
“My best album is called In Search Of A Song. That was my best shot right there. My finest hour, as they say. I could listen to the whole thing all the way through. There’s nothing really crammed into it.”
“It used to be that you’d have a song recorded by a major country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership.”
“Religion is a strange, wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion.”
“When you retire, it’s a place in life, a part of the journey. You just don’t quit work; you develop an attitude where you can do what you please.”
“I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I’d pick out an author and I would read all their books.”
“Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.”
“After I retired and came off the road, I gathered up all my musical instruments and suddenly, I wanted them all to be perfect.”
“I never fixed a story. I didn’t make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.”
“The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I’m sure of that.”
“The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.”
“My theory is if you have a religion, it’s a good one. Because some people don’t have any at all.”
“People think because you’re private, you have something you don’t want them to know.”
“I am a fan of history.”
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