If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

It's been like a bad dream I never woke from.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

I guess that my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I'll ever have.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well.

Drugs were pretty easy to quit taking. I was never addicted to anything to begin with. But then, liquor - I had to wait about another six years before I finally got around to quitting that. I'm sure glad I did.

The more alone I am, the more focused I can get. I've written things with people, some of which I liked and others I think are total travesties. Collaborating is trying to make a piece of music and get someone else to come up with the ideas. What's the fun of that?

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not.

I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.

And indeed this theme has been at the centre of all my research since 1943, both because of its intrinsic fascination and my conviction that a knowledge of sequences could contribute much to our understanding of living matter.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful - if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.

In examining the evidence of the Christian religion, it is essential to the discovery of truth that we bring to the investigation a mind freed, as far as possible, from existing prejudice, and open to conviction.

When you take a stand out of deep conviction, people know. They may not even agree, but they ask, 'Do I want someone who is willing to take a hard stand and someone I can trust to do that when the chips are down?' They want that.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide.

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

If you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.

It's my firm conviction that when Uncle Sam calls, by God we go, and we do the best that we can.

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.