Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

I am not a Christian artist, I am an artist who is a Christian.

I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages. 1994

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

I never did understand the resentment about Country artists "going pop". Either you've got what it takes to appeal to a whole lot of people, or you don't.