I feel sorry for a culture that depends too much on delegating its musical expression to professionals. It is fine to have heroes, but we should do our own singing first, even if it is never heard beyond the shower curtain.

I thought everybody could sing, because everybody in my family could.

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

When the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky.

People have often written about me, that I did this for this reason and that for that reason, and theyre usually 98 percent wrong.

When you sing the same song over and over and over again, it stops meaning what it originally meant to you. It starts sounding like white noise, or my washing machine.

Everybody has their own level of doing their music. ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.