Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.

I wish I was as sure about things as Bill Monroe was sure about things.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.

By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.

I don't get in vote in whether or how people remember me when I'm gone. It's really dangerous to sit around and worry about it too much, for me. It gets me way too in myself to worry about what people are going to think about me when I'm not around anymore.