Dwight Yoakam

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

“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.”

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

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

“Control success before it controls you.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.'”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”