"I got scars on my face that tell some kind of story. I'm looking in the mirror, and I got one scar that's really two scars - half from a baseball bat and half from playing football in college. I'll tell you, though, after a while, your face gets so wrinkled up you can hardly see them."

"To me, if you love it enough to devote your life to it, then you're doing the right thing."

"I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, so arriving in Nashville in the '60s was really exciting for me."

"Everything that I write is sort of autobiographical, and I don't know that I'm getting better, but I'm certainly running out of time."

"I feel so lucky to have lived the life that I did and to be surrounded by the people I love. I've got eight kids, and they're always laughing all the time. It's like music to my ears. I think that my frame of mind these days is probably happier than I've ever been, which is kind of odd, coming close to the finish line."

"I have a special place in my heart for Nashville because it saved my life back in the day."

"If it hadn't been for Johnny Cash, I'd probably have been a Nashville "songwriter "because that's what I had done for almost five years."

"The closest I've come to knowing myself is in losing myself. That's why I loved football before I loved music. I could lose myself in it."

"I never thought of acting as a creative process. Christ, I used to go to the movies and see Brando talking like he was trying to sell shoes, and he was great. I thought anybody could do it. Then I tried it, and I got so uptight, I'm limited as to what I can do on film."

"If you can't get out of something, get into it."

"There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary."

"I was working the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs, flying helicopters. I'd lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it."

"To me, the best love songs work on two - maybe three - different levels, where you're talking about the person who you're right opposite, and all the people like that."

"Your weight has to be behind the punch to make it matter."

"Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free."

"I've been trying to think of things to tell my kids, something that I could pass down, and it's like, gee whiz, I maybe never learned anything that didn't contradict itself."

"I have no regrets. I feel very grateful for the life that I had - you know, family I live with; and I've been doing work that I love, ever since I came to Nashville."

"I had a list of rules I made up one time. It says: Tell the truth, sing with passion, work with laughter, and love with heart. Those are good to start with, anyway."

"Freedom is just another word: It seems to get truer the older I get."

"Johnny Cash has always been larger than life."

"I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world."

"I think I'm a much better father as an older man than I was with my first kids. Occasionally, I have to yell at the little guys, but they don't take me seriously. 'Listen to the old guy,' they say. 'Isn't he great? He's mad.'"

"I've been writing songs since I was a little boy. You know, I think I wrote my first song when I was 11."

"I've never forgotten a single record I cut or a song I wrote."

"I've had a life of all kinds of experiences - most of them good. And I've got eight kids and a wife that puts up with everything I do and keeps me out of trouble."

"I boxed in Golden Gloves at Oxford and still know how to throw a straight left jab."

"The one thing I regret is missing the time with my older children when they were young."

"When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it's just the opposite."

"Just the words and melody - that's what moves your emotions."

"I wish my memory weren't so bad. They tell me it's from all the football and boxing and the concussions that I got."

"There are a lot of Iraqi people we can never pay back for what we've done."

"I don't think I'm that good a singer. I can't think of a song that I've written that I don't like the way somebody else sings it better."

"I had fought for my independence and fought for my freedom to do as I chose."

"It's much better being an older father. You don't have to go prove to the world and to yourself that you're who you want to be, for better or worse."

"I used to think that my songs were the best things that I would leave behind me. And I definitely think my kids are now. For starters, they're writing better songs than I was at their age."

"I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for - for its art."

"The most valuable thing to me seems to be time, and with time, I can be great. I have been... and I will be."

"When I was stationed in Germany, Johnny Cash was already a legend over there because he'd done some shows, then gone off to some bar straight afterwards and played just for the troops. So he was a real hero."

"'Heaven's Gate' was based on a true story about the cattle people: the people who had the money turned on the settlers who were in the area. And it was mainly a defense of their behavior. And the cattlemen's association had just about declared war on these people who were poaching cattle, and because they were mainly immigrants."

"I gave everything I ever wrote to Johnny Cash. I think he said later in some interview that he would take them home and throw them in the lake with all the other demos. I'm sure he got a million of them."

"There was time in the first half of the '80s when what I was saying on the stage was controversial. A lot of things I was talking about - Nicaragua and American foreign policy."

"Johnny Cash's legacy, I think if it was one word, it would be 'integrity.' He was the original wild man and grew from that guy that was doing all the crazy things that you read that rock n' rollers do to being someone who was like the father of our country, you know. He was a guest at the White House. He was Billy Graham's friend."

"There's a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we've moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn't play me. They were more conservative than I was."

"Johnny Cash's legacy, I think if it was one word, it would be 'integrity.' He was the original wild man and grew from that guy that was doing all the crazy things that you read that rock n' rollers do to being someone who was like the father of our country, you know. He was a guest at the White House. He was Billy Graham's friend."

"There was a film that really affected me, 'La Strada' by Fellini, where Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina travel around on his little motorcycle thing."

"Being in love with a lot of people is incompatible with a stable family life."

"I am grateful every morning I wake up. I've a big family full of kids, who laugh all the time and love each other."

"Human rights is something that wasn't hard to be inspired to write about because there have been so many violations of those rights."

"Those 'Idol' shows are kind of scary to me. They wanted me to be on one of those panels one time, and I said it's the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do. I would hate to have to discourage somebody."

"I never was one to go into an office and write. For one thing, I had a job. I was cleaning the ashtrays and setting up the studios at Columbia for a couple of years and working every other week down in the Gulf of Mexico flying helicopters. I didn't really get to just write songs for about five years."