I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I've always stuck with Gibsons. I've had Guilds and Fenders, too, but I always wind up going back to Gibsons.

As a solo artist, I just felt cemented in front of the mike stand. There was very little time to play with the audience and be a band member.

I don't like looking back.

When you sign with a label, they do insist upon certain rights, and if you have a competent attorney, your rights will be protected.

There were some older guitarists on my side of town, and I got to know many of them.

I feel like I have the greatest life an artist could dream of.

If music became extinct now, I don't know what I'd be good for.

I soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

I like being on the road, living in hotels. While I've got a real nice house, I go crazy when I'm there.

When it stops being fun, stop.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write.

I wish I had a nickel for every song that I've left in the bathroom, written down on a matchbox, or just totally forgotten about.

I'm not the kind of guy who deserves to play a vintage guitar because I'm too rough on instruments.

I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I was born in Alabama and my first live music experiences were in church. Every Sunday we watched regional gospel groups on television singing their hearts out.

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.

Success is fickle, but creativity is a gift.

It is all about being open and paying attention to the music in your head. I think most people have original music playing in their heads from time to time.

Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you're finished. You're a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already.

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day.

Make sure you know what you are signing when you sign a recording contract.

Les Pauls work out real well for me because I'll beat the hell out of them and they'll still work. The only trouble with them is finding good ones.

When I was about 3, my grandfather used to give me and my sister a nickel to sit out on the front porch with him and sing songs.

It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords.

When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.

On acoustic guitar I tend to stay in the key of D for some reason. On electric guitar I keep basic: C, G, D, and A. The key of D minor is also real good for me.

I don't write on tour. There is so much to do day in and day out when you are on the road.

I have always been a sucker for the big, upbeat chorus.

When I became 16 I started thinking seriously about singing.

I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations, where nothing is out of bounds.

I'd better be on the road, or I'll be going nuts. I'm not the kind of guy who sits around with a pipe and slippers watching soap operas.

We're kind of defined by our mistakes.

Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.

Timing is everything.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

By the time I did that third solo album, I'd finally learned how to do it, but I'd also learned that I liked being in a band.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.