Top 35 Dwight Yoakam Quotes

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a ’64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

It’s meant to reaffirm the validity of that music – clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

‘m really proud of it. To me, it’s a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character’s massive survival guilt.

Ironically, the success I’ve experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.

Control success before it controls you.

The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That’s what I do.

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, ‘Let’s see if we’re able to live among the living, walk among the living.’

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It’s really, truly, rural white America’s blues.

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

My parents were not affluent people and were not – didn’t come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she’d come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular – I can choose that.

I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

Music’s the one thing I try not to analyze. I don’t want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

I don’t regret any of the musical decisions I have made.

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

Fortunately any of the songs we’ve recorded can be extremely fulfilling to perform depending on the variety of circumstances that surround any given show.

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

My music is very personal. I’ve created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound – the expression of loneliness. That’s what it’s all about.

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It’s like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

I’ve always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me – he’d gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.

I’ll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music – which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old – is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt – if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it – move beyond self-doubt.

I can’t escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

In addition, I’m finishing a track for the movie ‘Waking Up In Reno’, but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.