Let's get the government stay out of our private lives, once and for all, and stop arresting smokers. Let's take a stand for personal freedom.

Those people out there like good music. They don't stop and ask themselves, 'Is it country or rock and roll?' If they like it, they will tell you.

In church I was told that if I so much as smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol, I’d be damned in hell for all eternity... it didn’t take long for me to start thinking that sounded all wrong... I didn’t cotton to the idea that your religion should be flaunted to other people. Your religion is for you, and is best kept close to your heart.

I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.

When I was growing up, Nashville was the place to go if you had songs to sell and thought you had talent and wanted to tour and be on Grand Ole Opry [radio show]. It was the big deal back in those days to play the Grand Ole Opry. And you could travel around the world saying, "Hi, I'm Willie from the Grand Ole Opry".

My granddaddy died when I was about 6 years old, I think. And my grandmother took a job cooking in the school lunchroom. So she did great. She made $18 a week.

I had gotten up to two, maybe three, packs (of cigarettes) a day. And my lungs were bothering me and I'd had pneumonia two or three times. And I was also smoking pot, and I decided, well, one of them's got to go. And so I took a pack of Chesterfields and took all the Chesterfields out, rolled up 20 big fat ones and put it in there, and I haven't smoked a cigarette since then.