I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.

Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.

Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.

It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.

What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

I don't care what the religion is called; as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them.

I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.

Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.

Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you.

When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.

Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.

The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.

I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.

A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world.

Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.

Even now, when I'm asked how I'm doing, I like to reply, 'Pretty good. I've got all my fingers and both eyes.

Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs.

There are worse things than being thought a Republican.

It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.

Chet Atkins... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived.

The time I spent thinking about how I was better than somebody else or worrying about somebody else's attitude was time I could put to better use.

I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.

Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.

What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.

There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.

I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.

For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.

Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.

In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.

No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.

My father was a police officer before he retired. One of my brothers is also a police officer, and I think they kind of expected I would do something along those lines, like become a fireman or something.

The fame aspect of winning the Masters... besides being married and becoming a father, that's a strong third there.

I'd rather be David Ladd's father than Alan Ladd any day.

I hated Chris, my brother. I would pull his hair and kick him, until one day my father gave him permission to fight back. I'll be apologizing to him for the rest of my life.

Being a father, well, I don't know if this is a change, but it makes me want to get out of here faster. Get off the clock. Just 'cause the baby is my reason for living, my reason for coming to work.

I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.

Therefore, I do not wish to consider any proposition to cede any portion of our tribal holdings to the Great Father.

My father was an agnostic.

My father taught me that the only way you can make good at anything is to practice, and then practice some more.

I want to be a soldier as my father was.

Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.

My father started me singing in church.