The size of the halls doesn't matter to me too much.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I'm like an old dog, I hate to be run off from home.

I feel about me like I'm one of the working people, just like you, and everybody else. I don't fit the part of a celebrity.

I just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it. The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music.

We have had to play some mighty tough audiences.

I'd think learning to play the guitar would be very confusing for sighted people.

The size of the halls doesn't matter to me too much.

I love music and love a good audience and still have to make a living. Why would I quit?

My real interest in music was the old 78 records and the sound of the music. I loved it and began to realize that one of the main sounds on those old records I loved was the guitar.

Since the beginning, the people of the college and I have agreed that the music of MerleFest is 'traditional plus.'

When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

A lot of technologies in the world were unusual in the beginning, and became standard. That's the beauty of bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovations.

Being a working actor, you're going to do a Spelling show. It's hard not to.

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

I have photographs taken of me at the time I was addicted, and thought I looked good. I see them today and realize my eyes were dead.

Television is fun, but it's hard, and if it gets too crazy I may just do it as a part-time thing.

There's no such thing is aging, but maturing and knowledge. It's beautiful, I call that beauty.

I try to do as many stunts as they'll let me do. I think it's important for an audience to feel that the actor's really doing it.

Conflict avoidance often causes greater conflict.

Normal muscles should function naturally in much the same manner as do the muscles of animals.

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

The union of feminine and masculine energies within the individual is the basis of all creation.

I think we all want to be remembered for what we did.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

No other minority community generates such a polarized response as Roma. On the one hand Roma signify an intriguing object of fascination with a unique history and culture while on the other hand Roma are excluded and persecuted wherever they live.

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

In 'Gravity,' nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. The way I tend to approach a film is that character and background are equally important; one informs the other. Here, Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity.

I keep on calling them records because they will always be records to me.

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

That's the thing, when you play younger characters they're always less casual. You're hungrier or more naive. Those things wane in time.

What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.

I'm quite subdued, believe it or not. I switch it on for the camera.

I never get sick on airplanes, which is incredible. You're basically in a flying petri dish.