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

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.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.