Radio was my friend after 'Jack & Diane' and 'Hurts So Good.'

Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.

Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No.

When did Jimmy Stewart not play Jimmy Stewart? When did John Wayne not play John Wayne? But that's what we like about them. When you talk about acting, you really have to respond to somebody's personality.

Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.

I've seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I've seen beautiful art in museums. I've seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.

My task with 'Uh-Huh' was to make a more even record and get away from juvenile topics like 'Hurts So Good.' But I also knew if I wanted to continue, I had to have more hits.

A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.

'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.

I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.

If you hide information from people, don't want people to see the Ten Commandments or don't want people to hear about Darwin, aren't we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that's incorrect.

I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn't have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I'd make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I'd be 64 years old and still making music.

Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.

I wish my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, because they were able to keep me grounded.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

Oh, I think country has changed tremendously. I think country has totally changed. Country music when I was a kid was Hank Williams. If you put Hank and Elvis together, there wasn't that musical difference. But as the Beatles showed up and the English invasion, I think country music got pretty far away from rock n' roll.

For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong.

My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And she'd come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.

I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.

Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.

I used to think that eating healthy was ordering a fish sandwich at McDonalds.

You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.