Merle Haggard Quotes
I think it was Tommy who told me, 'When your song is called 'XYZ' or whatever, every line has got to make sense against your title.' He showed me little methods of proving to yourself whether the line belongs, and ways of finding out whether you were able to get more out of a line if you tried.
Quotes to Explore
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An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.
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The song 'What Goes Up' was inspired as I was playing the piano and reminiscing about the Spaceship One launches I witnessed in the Mojave desert. It is an awesome thing to comprehend the magnitude of what a human being dreams and imagines can be realized.
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I've been doing this career for a really long time, but there was not a lot of reason, at the time when I wrote 'Fight Song,' to believe that I should keep going.
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When you're throwing the football the way you want to, you're not thinking about it. You're not thinking about your drop or your release point or the trajectory or where your feet are. It's just coming off your hand exactly the way you want it to, fluid and confident.
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Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change.
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Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.
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When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.
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'Freebird' is an anthem, and 'Simple Man' is a very nice song.
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It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.
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What's changed in New York, and what made us really change our thinking about New York, is that the different neighborhoods are becoming more important as shopping destinations than they used to be.
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I keep saying to everyone that one day I'll write a love song.
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My mom did this in the '90s. She'd put a bandana in her hair, cutoff jeans and throw flannel, and I just remember looking at her thinking she was the most beautiful supermodel ever.
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I want to move people to think and ponder the question of their own healthcare. And it doesn't need to be political thinking.
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Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level - environmentally, economically, culturally - is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.
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Most people don't know that I have a huge phobia of bugs. It's gotten worse and worse over the years, but I just can't stand them! Even thinking about bugs makes me queasy.
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I'm not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I'm not thinking about anything other than - I'm just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I'm just going to do it.
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It can even be a single note which defines the entire song.
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That's what makes it so fun to be on a team. You're sitting at your house, thinking up this wild, crazy stuff as to how it's going to go, and the other guys are sitting at their houses doing the same thing.
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If you look at my career... I couldn't possibly have chosen those subjects if I was thinking, 'That's a great commercial idea.' I'm not aware of a great musical where someone has done that.
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You can always go back to the place where you were comfortable, the place where you're from.
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I don't listen to a lot of music at all. I think that's very bizarre too, because it was such a comfort zone for me. But I don't know if I had my fill, but I don't listen to a lot of music, because I'm creating it.
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The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
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Even when I get to the point where I am acting and performing, where I want to be with my career, I'm never going to think of anyone as lower than me. Everyone's the celebrity of their own life, you know?
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I think it was Tommy who told me, 'When your song is called 'XYZ' or whatever, every line has got to make sense against your title.' He showed me little methods of proving to yourself whether the line belongs, and ways of finding out whether you were able to get more out of a line if you tried.
