Toby Keith quotes: the crazy-rich country singer’s stances and insights.
“I say if you’re going to take a chance on something, you just go full balls to the wall.”
“Don’t compromise even if it hurts to be yourself.”
“Everybody gets their window; everybody has their time.”
“My mom taught me the serenity prayer. The most important part is ‘the wisdom to know the difference.’ You have to know the difference between things you can control and things you can’t.”
“I write all year, and at the end of the year I put an album out. And if it sucks, it sucks, and if it’s good, it’s good. I just let it lay where it lays. It doesn’t stop me from doing another one next year.”
“Writing is not work. In fact, there’s nothing better. Writing is something that, if the music business went completely away tomorrow – radio stations quit existing and music quit being popular and it was old hat – I would still write songs.”
“Well, as you write through the years, you’ve got all kinds of things you write. You’re using your creative thoughts to write whatever’s in front of you.”
“Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It’s an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.”
“I wrote Red, White and Blue in 20-minutes on the back of a fantasy football computer printout.”
“When you’ve got an extra gear in your head where that’s all you do, you’ve constantly got a little radar up. And when something hits that strikes that beeper, hits that radar, it’s like my song skills kick right in and go, ‘Oh, okay, there’s a song in that.’ And then I start trying to figure it out.”
“So this is always my deal – I get to make them part of my world, and you get to introduce… you’re really only playing for your fans. You hope that somebody new out there discovers your music. But at the same time, if I want to try out something new, I just bring it out here on this tour and show it to these people and social media and the ability to pass video and song around, if it’s good enough and they want it – it’s really not up to me; it’s up to them.”
“I think after my second album, I knew I’d be set. I didn’t know if that meant set forever. But I knew I had the foundation that I could go work for at least another four or five years if nothing else happened.”
“If it’s good enough and they want it, it’ll take off. So that’s kind of the way you attack things today and I’m just happy out here. I’ve got a perfect music world.”
“I’m just a good idea away from a great song.”
“My first gig, I was about 17 or 18. But I’d been singing a long time. I got a guitar when I was eight, and started trying to write songs as a teenager.”
“I hammered on crossword puzzles until I could work the USA Today one in 15 minutes. Vocabulary helps you in songwriting. It helps you in business. It helps you in everything.”
“When somebody comes at me like I’m an ignorant redneck, they find out pretty quick that I can hold an intelligent conversation. I disarm ’em and defuse ’em and show them how f*ckin’ narrow-minded they were and how bad a mistake they made by taking a few words I wrote and rollin’ ’em into a big agenda.”
“But I don’t see things right-left. I see ’em right-wrong. I don’t have an agenda.”
“My dad always said, ‘There’s 10 Commandments in the Bible, but if you don’t lie and you don’t steal, the rest of ’em pretty much follow suit.'”
“It’s amazing how much power there is in the phrase ‘boot in your ass.'”
“I play golf with my shirttail out. I own a golf course because it’s very, very close to my house, and I don’t want to drive 45 minutes to the north side of Oklahoma City to play golf every day. I have race horses cuz I love horses and it’s my hobby.”
“I do a big thing for the Children’s Cancer Family Center in Oklahoma City and a lot of celebrities come in. We raise about a million six or seven in a one-night auction at the casino and then golf the next day at my golf course.”
“I made sure the first artist I signed was Toby Keith.”
“My father wasn’t famous. When he was buried, no celebrities showed up. There were no reporters. But the church held 700 people and there was a double overflow. My sister and I ended up holding hands by the hundreds – we didn’t have time to sit there and weep. How can you not be proud of that?”
“Everybody should have their own thing, and if he don’t want to be a role model, that should be up to him. In the right situations, I can try to help and be a role model, but I’m still gonna speak my mind, and if that affects the role model deal, then too bad.”
“I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.”
“Hate me if you want to, love me if you can.”
“Justice is the one thing you should always find.”
You know some other quotes you’d enjoy? Springsteen’s. Just sayin’.
