Guitarists From The United States

"Travel, arrival Years of an inch and a step toward a source I'm coming to you I'll be there in time"

"Oh Mom, the old man is telling me something His eyes are wide and his mouth is thin And I just can't hear what he's saying Oh Mom, I wonder when I'll be waking It's just that there's so much to do And I'm tired of sleeping"

"You're the jester of this courtyard With a smile like a girl's Distracted by the women With the dimples and the curls By the pretty and the mischievous By the timid and the blessed By the blowing skirts of ladies Who promise to gather you to their breast"

"When the darkness takes you With her hand across your face Don't give in too quickly Find the thing she's erased"

"Solitude stands by the window she turns her head as I walk in the room I can see by her eyes she's been waiting Standing in the slant of the late afternoon"

"If language were liquid It would be rushing in Instead here we are In a silence more eloquent Than any word could ever be These words are too solid They don't move fast enough To catch the blur in the brain That flies by and is gone."

"And she turns to me with her hand extended Her palm is split with a flower, with a flame ...And she says, "I've come to set a twisted thing straight", And she says, "I've come to lighten this dark heart""

"I'd like to meet you In a timeless, placeless place Somewhere out of context And beyond all consequences ...And we'll sit in the silence (That flies by and is gone) That comes rushing in And is gone"

"You come from far away With pictures in your eyes Of coffeeshops and morning streets In the blue and silent sunrise But night is the cathedral Where we recognized the sign We strangers know each other now As part of the whole design"

"I still have plenty of vices, but alcohol isn't one of them. It's probably just down to sleep and diet. If you travel long haul a lot or don't sleep much, it's not going to last very long, that's for sure. I'm pretty healthy so I think that helps a lot. I've been that way for a long time - 20 solid years of eating vegetarian/vegan and taking care of myself. That probably helps the preservation process."

"A note to our enemies. You think you know America, but you only see the tiny, inept, incompetent, cowering political tip of a very big, very capable iceberg. You don't know the Heartland where the people are fiercely independent and willing to defend this nation with their bare hands if that's what it takes. You don't know the steel workers in Pittsburgh with muscles that could break a man's neck like a twig. You don't know the swamp folks in Cajun country that can wrestle a full-grown alligator out of the water. You don't know the mountain folks in Appalachia who can knock a squirrel's eye out from a hundred yards away with a small caliber rifle. You don't know the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers and the seagoing folks. You don't know the truck drivers, the carpenters, the mountain men who live off the land, the hard rock miners or the small town cops who keep the peace in the rowdy border towns. No, you don't know America."

"How does the rest of the world perceive America under Obama? We're the nation that stood by and didn't lift a finger when the Iranian public was protesting their government. We voiced no support and did not try to help in any significant way, and the protest was soon quelled. We're the nation that drew red lines in Syria and watched them being crossed without a whimper. We're the nation that only uttered a few lukewarm words as Putin invaded the Crimea and the Ukraine. We're the nation that traded five of the world's most dangerous terrorists for one American deserter. We're the nation that gave away the store to insure that Iran can finance its terrorist attacks and be assured of having a nuclear device in a few years."

"We will begin the long process of rebuilding the world's greatest military, we will level the playing field in international trade and revitalize American industry, we will give our friends reason to trust us again. Our enemies will have reason to fear us again, and our citizens will have reason to believe again. No, you don't know America, and you don't want to find out the hard way."

"Pray for our troops."

"I was brought up the best way that I could be brought up with what we had to do with. I could have had a better education, and I could have had better clothes to wear to school. I could have had a better chance, you know. But if I'd had the best education in the world, I might have not played music."

"Bill, in some ways, he was very inarticulate about his feelings. In other ways, he was very profound about his feelings. And when you got him into a certain mood where he was being more introspective, he really could be very profound, I felt."

"There are questions I'm still not wise enough to answer, just wise enough to no longer ask."

"Maybe some folks are alcoholics and others are just voluntary drunks. Maybe some folks drink due to body chemistry and others due to their lazy characters. Maybe some have drinking problems, while others have problems enough to drink."

"I've seen hate change many things for the worse. I've seen love change everything for the good."

"While he and his idol, Hank Williams, have both affected generations with a plaintive veracity of voice that has set them apart, Jones has an additional gift—a voice of exceptional range, natural elegance, and lucent tone. Gliding toward high tenor, plunging toward deep bass, the magisterial portamento of his onward-coursing baritone emits white-hot sparks and torrents of blue, investing his poison love songs with a tragic gravity and inflaming his celebrations of the honky-tonk ethos with the hellfire of abandon."

"The greatest thing since sliced bread."

"If we could all sound like we wanted to, we’d sound like George Jones."

"I would give anything if I could sing like George Jones."

"Jones is the man behind what might be the greatest country song since 1980 with “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He’s influenced everyone from Waylon Jennings to Alan Jackson and is respected by some of the greatest musicians of all time (Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, etc.)."

"I couldn't think or eat nothin' unless it was Hank Williams, and I couldn't wait for his next record to come out. He had to be, really, the greatest."

"When people ask me who my favorite country singer is, I say, 'You mean besides George Jones?"

"That ain't no part of nothin'."

"It ain't only the colored folks has the blues; there's many a white man that's had 'em."

"After Charlie [Charlie Monroe, Bill's brother] and me broke up, I was searching for a name for my group. And I wanted a name from the state of Kentucky. Before I come to WSM in Nashville - I started on WWNC, Asheville - why, I'd already decided on using the name "bluegrass," because that's what they'd call Kentucky, the Blue Grass State. So I just used "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys," and that let people throughout the country know I was from Kentucky, saved a lot of people from having to ask me where I was from. Governor Ford, he claims I've done more than any one man for Kentucky - every time I use the word "bluegrass" it leads back to the state."

"I took my $100,000 and bought a new Corvette, a lot of cocaine, and spent the rest on foolishness."

"It's never been for love of money. I thank God for it because it makes me a living. But I sing because I love it, not because of the dollar signs."

"(When asked who the three finest old time guitarists were) Well, I would have to pick Travis, you know; I think he's a great man with his music, and there's been many a man that's copied from Merle. You know, they say he learned from a man in Kentucky. Well, I know this Mose Rager he learned from, he learned from Arnold Shultz, the man I speak of, a colored man, in playing the blues. So I think it all leads back to this old colored man back in Kentucky."

"The word "hillbilly", I've never liked that, and I've never used that in my music."

"We weren't really interested in those bands; we were—because we came out of this subterranean scene. And then Nirvana breaks big, and it's just diametrically opposite: we have, like, facial hair, and just, kind of, logger shirts, but we're all, like, "sensitive" and "feminine"—you know what I mean?"

"I own guns. I think they're a good tool to have out in the country, and I should be able to protect my home and my family."

"I like my guns. Yeah, because it just makes me more comfortable."

"I don't really like his [Ted Nugent's] reactionary politics. He's a lot like the people on the left, you know what I mean?"

"Well, it was just—it seemed like it was violence, and, like, 'cause I went by some of the stores that, like, I don't really eat at McDonald's, y'know, but a lot of people do, and so there are these people who want, y'know, they're-they're socialists but they hate people, y'know, so they go trash the McDonald's, and I just think it was just reckless violence, and they weren't tryin'a accomplish anything, and they said—he was writing something on the wall, some kind of graffiti that was just stupid and cliché, and I said, "Hey, how would you like if someone did that to your house?" and he yelled back, "Fuck you!" and these other people started yelling "Fuck you!" at me; I'm, like, "Oh," like "I'm in trouble.""

"Globalisation is a great thing, and the genie's out of the bottle; it's called the Information Revolution. It has a promise to bring opportunity and information to all corners of the world. It's a wonderful thing."

"If you hear a song you like, start dancing. That's what I do, I'll just start dancing, and that's it. That's all there is to it."

"Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy."

"People standing on escalators! And that is a testimony to human laziness! I mean, the guy who invented the escalator is just, probably, kicking himself in the ass. Do you think the guy made the escalator so people—and they're made like stairs—just so people stand on it so you go up and down? You're supposed to walk on 'em so you get there faster. You know? And then people stand on there. So every time Im on an escalator, I'm just like, "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me…." You know? That's my pet peeve, right there. And I'm gonna do something about it, and I'm urging you to do something about it! Write your congressman, get a group together, get together, and—I think we can do something about this."

"I do feel like, kinda like a misfit; usually I feel, inside, I'm a misfit. Like, I don't really watch sports, or a lot of…"

"America is a fucking police state."

"It seems like our politics is so old, like, it almost seems like turning on the t.v. and there's ABC and CBS and NBC, and, y'know, there's like one newspaper in town, and so they're all pushing things on us, and that's all going away."

"A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"Yeah, I was a Democrat for about four or five years—active Democrat—and I thought I could reform the party; maybe I wasn't going about it right, maybe somebody can and somebody will, y'know? But I don't see it. It's just a top-down structure, it's a soft-money conduit, and, y'know, and like Nancy Pelosi, she's gonna lose the election again, and it's just like, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing—wrong, wrong thing—over and over again. Republicans, they have a real big demographic problem, because they're the party of old white people, and they're not reaching out to folks."

"Nick Gillespie: So, um, how do you self-describe politically? Krist Novoselic: I'm a, what, an anarcho-capitalist socialist…I don't know…I'm kinda a moderate, I think I'm moderate. Nick Gillespie: So you're an anarcho-capitalist socialist moderate. Krist Novoselic: I mean I'm a gun-owning pacifist, so there you go. I'm an anarcho-socialist—you know what I mean? Nick Gillespie: Anarcho-socialist— Krist Novoselic: —capitalist— Nick Gillespie: —capitalist, gun-toting… Krist Novoselic: Yeah, it's just like I, y'know, I just tryin'a, tryin'a make it work in this world and...basically I'm just a small-D democrat."

"Well, I think it just goes back to the values that I grew up with in the punk rock world because it was this decentralised world, and so we just made our own way—like we'd be antigovernment or, you know—but we really didn't complain a lot; we were more action-oriented, like, people were publishing fanzines, we were setting up shows, we were getting in vans and touring around, and we were associating with other people, so…y'know, I just like that idea."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be."