Bret Hart is my cousin, I'm told. Didn't know that until I was, I don't know, 28, 25.

In the morning, I'm juicing two apples, two carrots, two celery, two beets, two ginger. I'm drinking that every morning to try to keep the cancer away.

I put my heart into my career, and the people knew that I did that; and I went from being the most hated man to one of the best loved.

Ask me for my shirt off my back, I'll give it to you. Tell me? Not a chance.

I was going nine times a week. You get to a point where you don't really know who you are. You're running on high octane, and you'll take all comers in every arena because there was no police. Every arena, you'd take on everybody that would come in the ring.

I was born in Saskatoon.

With Hulk, I don't agree with all his choices, but you know what, I don't hear people saying all the great things he does. When he was on the Wheaties box, all those kids that said their prayers and took their vitamins, I don't hear them saying that.

Vince McMahon got really angry at me for leaving the WWE-F-G, whatever it is now.

The heel runs the match.

I am really good with Lego!

Only people who can't draw money need belts.

I was the youngest in the world in history when I started, 15. That's illegal now.

I did three television shows in Poughkeepsie in one day, with Adrian Adonis and The Iron Sheik. They gave us no food.

Real wrestling fans always knew Hogan couldn't wrestle. And he's not exactly an intellectual, either... The path he chose is very simple. He wears spandex in the airport. That's his identification as a man.

I hate a bully, and I hate racists.

I've had Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy as a tag-team partner.

It seems like I have been fighting someone, something, someplace, in some manner, my whole life.

Without putting words in anybody's mouth, I think that Roddy has a reputation for being a rebel. I don't think that's a big secret.

I lived on the street myself.

Bagpipes is a woodwind instrument, so you have to warm it up. But in a wrestling dressing room? You've got to be kidding me.

I only had an A game... no matter where I was.

For years and hundreds of thousands of miles, I drove with one knee, with the eight-track and the light dome on in the car, and a yellow pad, just writing down random ideas. I had notebooks and notebooks. The next morning, I'd go, 'Whoa, what was I thinking?' But there'd be one or two ideas that weren't that bad.

I've had over seven thousand pro fights.

I'm not as sharp as I used to be.

The business has taken a toll on me.

I was 15 years old when I started wrestling full time, and I know what I had to go through to get here.

It was by accident I got into wrestling. Somebody didn't show up, and I just filled in.

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

I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.

With 'Fate's Right Hand,' I think I reached a level of completeness in forming and articulating ideas at around the same time I reached a place where I could match it with my singing voice. It was a kind of coming together.

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

I'm enough of a southeast Texas boy - there's enough white trash in my blood that when somebody gives me money to make a record, I feel like I have to please them instead of myself.

I have a history, and I am proud of my legacy as a songwriter, all of the songs that I've brought forth into our culture. I'm proud of that.

Adolescence in our culture for a young woman, for a girl, is a hard road.

I don't make music for the radio. And when I was being played on the radio a lot, I didn't.

I've had a nice career. I'm no David Bowie or Bruce Springsteen out there. I'm not an icon. I'm just a working artist.

Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

I'm a vulnerable guy.

I wrote a song a good long while ago, 'I Ain't Livin' Long Like This,' that has been around and been recorded by a lot of people, but it was basically childhood memory.

I'm a pretty successful songwriter and known in some circles, but I didn't think the story of my career was of any real entertainment value.

The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do 'Things Have Changed,' or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo's 'The David' or that movie 'Lost in Translation' - it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.

Over the years, I've come to realize that writing 'I Ain't Living Long Like This' was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan - artists no one has ever heard of.

Invariably, collaboration leads to new forms of self-expression and to the things that move you.

I concern myself with timelessness all the time. If you're not swinging for museum quality, your mind is not in the right place. It doesn't mean you get there, but at least it's the intent.

I will say this: I've always sort of had maybe an inflated sense of my ability to sequence songs in a narrative flow.

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

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

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

As an artist, one of the ingredients to doing good work is self-awareness, and that's something I cultivate.