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

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.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.