You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play.

If people work for me over the years, I expect them to be paid what they're owed, but I don't expect them to be paid more than they earn.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!

I often get myself in love trouble because I'm so passionate; I love so much and so deep.

I don't have to keep a diary. It seems like for the last 40 years my life has been lived in the press, so I can Google any date in my history and find out what I was doing.

A baby, a real live baby was the craziest thing a fan has sent. Someone left a baby on our front doorstep with a note that they wanted us to raise it. Of course, we contacted the authorities and they took care of the baby.

In the early days, Porter Wagoner would not exactly scold me, but he's say, 'You're writing too many damn verses. You're makin' these songs too damn long.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, but I'm tellin' a story. I have a story to tell.' And he'd say, 'Well, you're not going to get it on the radio.' If I start writing a song, I'm writing it for a reason. People would say that I had to have two verses, and a chorus, and a bridge. I tried to learn that formula.