"I've always liked Frank Sinata and Big Band music."

"I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was."

"I remember that in '81, country radio was pretty pop, and everybody wanted a crossover record - and all of a sudden it came back to traditional. Now it's kind of swung the other way a little bit, but it always comes back."

"I just continue to look for different material, great material, as good as I can find, and try to go in there and do as good a job as I can do in making it a record. That's all you can expect. That's all that you can do."

"I spend most of hunting season at the ranch. We all love to hunt whitetails, and we have a pretty good supply in South Texas. I also love to hunt elk in Arizona, mule deer in Utah, and I've been to Canada to hunt caribou."

"You know, traditional country music is something that's going to be around forever."

"I like people who are loyal to me, and I like to be loyal, too."

"It's been a long hard ride. See you on the other side"

"I used to do a lot of interviews in the early '80s, when my career started, but it came to a point when I decided I didn't want to talk anymore, and people kind of understood that and left me alone."

"I want to reach the point where people hear my name and immediately think of real country music."

"I don't mind traveling that much when I can go somewhere and stay there for a while, but touring is different. You rarely see anything. You get there early in the morning and you're resting all day, and you go in and do a sound check, and you do the show, and then bam you're gone."

"Life's not the breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away."

"You don't have to be a cheater to sing a cheatin' song, that's what I'm saying."

"This is the kind of problem you want to have! Country radio has been great to me my whole career. I can't thank those folks enough."

"You know, legends are people like Haggard and Jones and Wills and Sinatra. Those people are legends. I'm just a young buck out here trying to keep in that same circle with the rest of 'em."

"I can only say thank you and thanks also to all of the great songwriters who wrote those wonderful songs that became number ones."

"I've had great fans, and they've been so loyal over the years."

"A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception."

"I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous."

"I think anyone who is famous is a moron if they're on Twitter. It's just stupid."

"Everyone in Kiss is replaceable. My ego will tell you that I am not, but that's not so."

"I partied in every capital in Europe, basked on all the famous beaches, and good-timed it in South America, the South Seas, the Orient, and the more palatable portions of Africa."

"I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought."

"There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful; nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget."