Rodney Crowell

“In the 74 years and nearly four months marking her time on what she called this crooked old Earth, my mother rarely drew a healthy breath. Still, to say that life wasn't fair for this awkwardly glib, yet deeply religious woman, would fail to take into account her towering instinct for survival.”

“As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style.”

“I never allowed writer's block to be a reality. I framed it up for myself early on. I said, 'OK, if I'm not writing, the well is just filling up. I'm going to be patient with this.'”

“The way I made 'Diamonds and Dirt,' which had all those hits in a row, was that I was just making a record. It was just the one that rolled up in my natural process, and it happened to be commercial.”

“So much of inspiration comes from collaboration with other musicians.”

“Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that's timeless.”

“I wouldn't go as far to say that anything that I've done is timeless.”

“I knew Townes Van Zandt a little bit.”

“As a young man, I craved fame. I was trying to fix holes in my soul that were there from childhood.”

“I made this record in the late '80s called 'Diamonds and Dirt,' and it was a big hit. It had five No. 1's, and it was my commercial peak, really.”

“My people came from western Tennessee and western Kentucky.”

“Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.”

“Singing duets is instinctive, intuitive.”

“Life can be either of two things: What it makes of you or what you make of it.”

“Since 'Houston Kid,' I've got a pretty good track record. Before that, I wrote some hit songs, but I didn't come into my own until I was about fifty. Before that, I had bursts of talent.”

“My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, 'Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.' And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.”

“I've often said to young songwriters when they want to write with me, 'Let's take a stab at ten songs, and we might get one really good one.'”

“When you're younger, love is this magic thing where the heavens open up. You live 40 years past that, you realize sometimes the heavens close down.”

“At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.”

“My mother's a very spiritual woman, and I think Pentecostal religion, Bible religion, was very important to her because it gave her a context for a very spiritual approach to life.”