I admired Mary's work very much. From the time someone gave me 'The Liars' Club,' I immediately went into a world where I grew up. And I remember, when I finished the book, I actually thought, 'You know what, I need to write songs with her.'

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.

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.

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.

Because of my methodology and my sensibilities to write songs, I'm not very comfortable with the notion to rush in any creative endeavor.

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

I don't know if I owned a toothbrush until I was 19, maybe. I didn't come from stock that placed any importance on the toothbrush. But a couple of girls I met changed that. And I would do anything to get a girl to pay attention to me long enough that I could feel good about myself.

When I go back to seek inspiration - whether it be from Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Ray Charles or Bob Dylan - it's from the performance. Those artists are in the studio playing their instrument and singing. There's no going back and redoing the vocals.

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.

I don't think that 'The Weight of the World' is all about politics. It's like, how the environment and how the natural topography of this planet would ever fall into a political division, debate, just leaves me confused.

It's a gift that we get to do the work that we do to call ourselves artists.

'The Outsider' is a culmination of a lot of things I've been working diligently toward as a recording artist. Hopefully it will render my past pigeonholing obsolete while positioning me more solidly as a socially conscious American singer/songwriter. Wouldn't that be entertaining?

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.'

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

Have I felt misunderstood by Music Row at times? Of course.

Sometimes, the better writing comes when the song speaks through me and tells me what the song wants to say.

Strangely enough, I've become a Metallica fan.

I can't make a perfect record. When I try to, I bleed all the feeling out of it.

I've finally figured out how to make a Rodney Crowell record, and that's let it be, leave the mistakes.

Conversation is a really good way to get things done.

Favorite country singer of all time... Hank Williams... Well, then there's Willie Nelson. Can I have three? I can't do one. Then if I have three, I'll need five. Hank Williams for sure. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.

I think, in the middle of the '90s, I made a couple of records where I tried to figure out what I thought the radio wanted from me. They weren't my best records by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't take me too long to figure out, 'Whoa, back up, dude. Just go back to following your heart, and it will all be OK.'

When I write a song with somebody else in mind, it's putting the cart before the horse. The way I write best is when I allow the song to tell me what it wants to be.

The chances of getting Townes to like it were very remote. When I wrote 'Til I Gain Control Again,' Townes Van Zandt sort of nodded. And I thought, 'Yes!'

When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.

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.

I don't want my son to have to collect a bunch of 'New York Times' articles to see what I was like.

I love pressure situations. I won't run for cover, and I'll try to take as much of the heat as possible. Because I feel I can stand it better than most people.

I want to prove that a fat guy can get to 100 still working.

If you've got a big star like O'Reilly, it does overshadow what the hard-news guys do during the day. That's the nature of television.

I have a good eye for talent, and my talent performs the best.

I've never wanted my kid faced with the idea of, 'Who's the fat guy sitting in the living room? What the hell is he doing?' I figure I might as well go to work so he can say his dad works.

I view myself more as a traditionalist than a conservative. But I like the traditions, so I tend to try to keep them alive. But I'm open to any kind of political thought - I don't care - I have people that I don't agree with, and I have good friends I don't agree with, but for me personally, I'm more comfortable with the traditional stuff.

There is a tendency in the media to simplify me to the point that I am somehow a tough guy. I think there is a lot more to me.

Joe McGinniss will be remembered as a talented man. He changed political writing forever in 1968. We differed on many things, but he had a good heart.

My toughest job every day is maintaining intensity with myself and with my staff.

I quit politics because I hated it.

I worked three summers putting in sewer pipe and guardrail on the road in Ohio.

In most news, if you hear a conservative point of view, that's called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that's bias.

Television and I grew up together.

There is a - deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there's a laziness in me.

Tell me who you want to see on the Left, and I'll hire them. If you give me a big name that's out there, that's floating around and wants work, I'd be happy to hire them.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

The press is supposed to watch the powerful. And not throw in with them.

I believe business news is general news.

I believe most people think the economy is very important.

I could never be elected.

Listen, we elected Warren G. Harding. Anybody has a chance.

The news business is simple, but it's not easy to do well.