Dwight Yoakam quotes:

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me - he'd gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.

When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, 'Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living.'

Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

Another lesson about a naive fool who came to Babylon, and found out that the pie don't taste so sweet.

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

I quit eating red meat a long time ago. I'm a vegetarian, but not by a moral issue or any kind of stand. I still eat dairy. And I quit eating sugar about the same time I quit eating red meat, but I eat fruit.

m really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.

I don't regret any of the musical decisions I have made.

I'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.

Buddy , you might think that I've lost my mind. But mister, I'd pay twice to do it one more time.

Control success before it controls you.

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

In retrospect I wrote things about my life and my family's existence, I realized that it was a frighteningly harsh way to make a living. And I used to say that they were slowly dying trying to make a living.

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself.

I heard more of the stories from my mother and my granny and my aunts that would describe what they had known that he didn't often talk about. I remember seeing [grandfather] as a child. He was working in a mine that was fairly close to their home there in Betsy Lane, Ky., and it was so close in proximity that he wouldn't clean up or shower there. He would just drive back home. And I remember one time seeing him come in and it was like seeing an alien person show up because he was still covered in coal dust and soot, and it had a profound impact on me.

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently

When the whistle blows each morning and I walk down in that cold, dark mine, say a prayer to my dear savior. Please let me see the sunshine one more time. When oh when will it be over? When will I lay these burdens down? And when I die, dear lord in heaven, please take my soul from 'neath that cold, dark ground.

My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

I was raised in the Church of Christ, which was a very abstinent faith. And I just didn't [drink] - there was never anything that I found seductive enough, I guess, to have a romance with it.

The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That's what I do.

I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.

Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

I guess I stayed with the faith. I mean, organized religion is not something that I've maintained a direct connection to in my life, but the spirituality of it has had an indelible impact on my life and remains with me.

I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.

I listen to hundreds of those hymns sung repeatedly over the years of my life. And I know that they probably influenced a rhyme scheme maybe to certain extent. They influenced the pentameter of placement of words, etc. And it's not something that's a conscious thing that occurred.

Those songs [from church], I think, shaped to some degree how I would evolve as a writer, pentameter of songs, the melodies of those kind of hillbilly hymns - I used to refer to them - because they were not Southern gospel as much as they were passed down from Scottish Welsh Protestant hymnals.

The congregation that I was raised in was one that sang and a non-instrumental fashion. It was all a cappella singing, and so that had a major influence on me.

I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

They both sang. My grandmother had a very haunted mountain voice and would sing hymns. My grandpa would sing but in a very, very subdued way.

I needed to get into a nightclub and stand up and present the material that way. I needed to present it live.

Sadly, I wish I had been able to play ["Miner's Prayer"] for [grandfather]. Yeah, I'll never escape the influence of him in my life. And my - his wife, my grandmother, Earlene Tibbs - those experiences with them shaped me musically probably more profoundly than anything else in my life and shaped me as a writer.

I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.

I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."

[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.

[My grandfather -a miner] had black lung, and he didn't talk about it much. It's almost like a combat veteran. But he witnessed some horrific things.

I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear the son of God discloses. And he walks with me, and he talks with me. And he tells me I am his own, and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.