Merle Haggard Quotes

I came up during that time when music, to me, was really music. It wasn't about talking about a woman and calling them a derogatory name or something like that. It was real music.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

I always composed music as a little kid.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

The music has had a certain quality that people like just because it's a real true expression of how we are as musicians.

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

When I was a kid my Dad never let me sing Patsy Cline songs for one simple reason: they've already been done.

Artists have the unique ability to tell stories. It's not charts and graphs that get people to change.

I was really young, but I can't say that I wrote much of anything. I liked to scribble; I thought of it as that. But I was playing guitar and ukulele when I was in second grade.

We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.

There's such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar... flamenco, jazz, rock, blues... you name it, it's there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.

I was always into performing and dancing as a kid and acting was a safe place to have all my feelings, which is good as a child.

I used to teach on a college level, and I've taught in schools where kids just wanted to be artists, and I used to be furious with them if they didn't read, because they just seemed so - their education seemed so thin if all they could do was pick up a paint-loaded brush and fling it at a canvas. I mean, there was nothing to express there, except maybe their own personal feelings. But if they're not - if they don't have a grounding in the way these things have been expressed by other people down through the centuries, then they're lost.

I think my favorite medium is music, with my main tools being my voice and a guitar. But I do find every other medium extremely fulfilling and useful in helping everything I do. Sometimes I need to make a song just for a comic. All of the art and mediums are connected for me.

I don’t need the money. I don’t care if I make a dime on this. Let me make a good record.

I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.

It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

To me a guitar is kind of like a woman. You don't know why you like 'em but you do.