My music is about the journey, about love and the human experience.

It sounds corny, but I've promised my inner child that never again will I ever abandon myself for anything or anyone else again.

My music is about the journey, about love and the human experience.

The failures and successes are necessary for learning.

To heal from the inside out is the key.

I am a fan of today's sound as long as we don't get too slick, and yet I am very reverent of my roots.

Digital downloading of music has affected us all in adverse ways.

I have a very deep and wide relationship with my fans.

You have to fill your cup. You then give away the overflowing, but you keep a cupful for yourself.

Most of us are imprisoned by something. We're living in darkness until something flips on the switch.

Silence is refreshment for the soul.

I always make music that is true to my spirit.

I used to only worry about the #1's and all of the awards. But that was a long time ago.

My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.

I learned again that the mind-body-spirit connection has to be in balance.

I also believe my musical abilities are a true gift from God.

I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.

I've learned lately that no one is going to hand me a permission slip and tell me to take time out for me.

There's a place for all types of country music as long as there is honesty and realness and a real human experience for the fans.

I know that the internet has helped a new world audience find me.

When you are real in your music, people know it and they feel your authenticity.

The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.

Without love in you life, you have nothing.

If I can make a connection, one connection, to any one listener in the world, I consider that successful.

The love of these people and of my fans mean more than any award or special accomplishment.

I never took a music lesson in my life, it just came naturally.

It took me 36 years to be able to be by myself and like it.

Success takes us to the top and away from those we love.

I don't take my fans' love and dedication for granted.

We are losing our superstars like Johnny and June Carter Cash and that breaks my heart.

I am a child of God.

Because I now realize, after all this time, I have never truly felt worthy of all that I have been given.

I am most proud that I stayed true to the music of my soul.

You have to fill your cup. You then give away the overflowing but you keep a cupful for yourself.

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.