Life is - the way God has given it to me was just a platter - a golden platter of life laid out there for me. It's been beautiful.

If you have political convictions... keep 'em to yourself

I recently found myself going through a period of uncertainty about my future as a performer, my status as a personality, the believability of my Christian witness and the knowledge of God's will in my life. I felt a force bigger than myself saying, 'Lay back. Take it easy. Study hard. Read your bible. Think, write and keep your mouth shut for awhile.'

I've never been accused of a felony. I never spent time behind bars except for a few overnight jail times back in the Sixties. [But] I think there's a little bit of a criminal in all of us. Everybody's done something they don't want anybody to know about.

A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.

I started to write the song. And I was in Gladewater, Texas, one night with Carl Perkins and I said, I've got a good idea for a song. And I sang him the first verse that I had written, and I said it's called "Because You're Mine." And he said, "I Walk The Line" is a better title, so I changed it to "I Walk The Line."

I had an empathy for prisoners and did concerts for them back when I thought that it would make a difference - you know? - that they really were there to be rehabilitated.