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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.'

My mother was apt to fall out on the floor and start speaking in tongues. Actually, it was a great performance... It was great theater. As a 5-year-old, I understood that, although it scared me and there was a little part of me going, 'I don't know about this. This seems over-the-top to me,' at the same time, I did understand that this was passion.

In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.

The more I'm dedicated to this work, the more I'm able to satisfy my deep need to create. And that's a pretty good thing. If you take half-decent care of yourself, that can propel you on into productive later years.

My family was very poor. Strangely, though, my father was an enigma in that he was always working. He was not a ne'er-do-well. He wasn't lazy. He just couldn't hold on to money. It just, it was an enigma for him. He just, his pockets were always empty.

My mother met my father at a Roy Acuff concert.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.

Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.

Violence was very much a part of my mother's upbringing - a little less so with my father's, but my father was an angry man when he was young. He was angry and frustrated and had no idea how to channel anger.

You start creating art through the people that are looking at you, trying to route it through their sensibilities or their eyes, and then it's not you anymore.

To me, Hank Williams is the first rock-and-roll star.

Underfunded, underwhelmed, and out of their league from the git-go, my parents took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.

I feel like I'm a realized artist, but hey, the good news is I can get better, and I'm going to continue to aim for that.

Pretty much any artist that I know of that has found that mentor status, if they're generous and okay to bestow a bit of mentor-type information, it's do what you feel, not what you think.

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

My people came from western Tennessee and western Kentucky.