Alan Jackson

“Oklahoma's always been good to me.”

“I'm usually just enjoying life.”

“You just write about things that happen.”

“The older you are, I think you realize what you enjoy and what you don't need, what wears you out and what's important.”

“I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.”

“Making music is still what keeps a fire going on in me.”

“I think every album you have, especially if it's done well, you feel like you're competing with yourself.”

“I've been a lot of places, and my wife, Denise, she likes a lot of the fancy restaurants. I'm more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel. Those are the kind of people who like the kind of music I'm making.”

“I mean, I am driven and laid-back at the same time.”

“He's written some great songs. I thought that 'Blues Man' was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.”

“If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world - all you hear about on the news is all the bad stuff everyday, but what was refreshing to me was after that, you saw how many good people there are out there. For every one bad one, there's a thousand good ones.”

“The fan base that I've had all these years has come along. Some of them are not as plugged into the digital world, so they want to go out and buy the CD at Walmart or something.”

“I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn't have when I was young.”

“My mother kept asking me, 'When are you going to do a gospel album?' And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.”

“I've had to live with women all my life. I grew up with four older sisters, and I was the baby and the only boy.”

“I've had several working-man songs that I like.”

“What I enjoy doing more than anything is, I have my little antique car collection, and when the weather is pretty I like to get out one of my old cars. I have a little route I run down in the country, down Nachez Trace Parkway. The loop down through there is just really relaxing, not much traffic.”

“I've always said that if you have songs on the radio and get played, you've got to have a tour to support that.”

“If you can last until you're 40 years old, hopefully you'll be mature enough to figure out the rest of the years.”

“I've always wanted to make a bluegrass album.”