Experience Quotes

[Sam Phillips] laughed at me. I just didn't like the way I Walk The Line sounded to me. I didn't know I sounded that way. And I didn't like it. I don't know. But he said let's give it a chance, and it was just a few days until - that's all it took to take off.

I kept talking to my producers at Columbia about recording one of those [prison] shows. So we went into Folsom on February 11, 1968, and recorded a show live.

Sam Phillips asked me to go write a love song, or maybe a bitter weeper. So I wrote a song called, "Cry Cry Cry," went back in and recorded that for the other side of the record.

You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.

When I first moved to New York I wanted to be a dancer, I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I've never even been to the 'hood. Not that there's anything wrong with the 'hood.

I wish I could tell you me and my rock band were traveling around, strung out. No, we were a family band. Straight Partridge Family.

My mother is very emotional as well, but my dad is more of the guts of the family. He was the main preacher, so he kind of had this little Pentecostal flair, but they are born-again.

When I was fourteen and first started going out, I always wanted to be the opposite of everyone else. So I would go to the club in a polo T-shirt and pants and sneakers and a hat on backward, just so I would not be dressed like other girls.

I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Experience teaches that silence terrifies the most.

I started singing about three years ago, I entered a local singing competition called Stratford Idol. The other people in the competition had been taking singing lessons and had vocal coaches. I wasn't taking it too seriously at the time, I would just sing around the house. I was only 12 and I got second place.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It's my favorite part of the business - live concerts.

I've been going to Russia since 1979. I've been going quite frequently, and I've always had a wonderful rapport with the Russian audiences and with the Russian people.

I've always been dead set against festivals, really suspicious and wary.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

The Monster Ball is by nature a protest: A youth church experience to speak out and celebrate against all forms of discrimination + prejudice.

I dropped out of NYU, moved out of my parent's house, got my own place, and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.