For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.

I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.

The truth is, I've been going pretty much nuts all year. I constantly have to fight being scattered. I feel like I'm on automatic pilot from fatigue. The hardest thing is trying to be present, living for the moment, for everybody in the family.

I thought I knew Texas pretty well, but I had no notion of its size until I campaigned it.

Well, our songwriting process is pretty collective.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

As a kid, I was a pretty good little sprinter.

Don't tell a woman she's pretty; tell her there's no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you.

If my life had to be a song I would name it, 'Live every day like its your best day ever', because it pretty much is.

Kissing someone is pretty intimate, actually very intimate, and your heart always kind of skips a beat before you do that.

Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.

There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.