Robert Hilburn Quotations

I learned how difficult it is to be an artist. There are always compromises. The record company wants you to do this, your fans want you to do this, your family, you can't concentrate on your work. It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up. That's why I have so much respect for people like Dylan and Neil Young and Tom Waits, because they keep at it. I have a new respect for a true artist.

There was a lot of sorrow in [Johnny] Cash's life. Even while he's trying to make music to inspire people he's fighting day after day with his own demons and sorrows.

It's important to realize that everybody who went into country music, and most everybody who went into rock and roll in the '50s, they had no more goal than a hit on the jukebox. Johnny Cash from the very beginning had a goal that he wanted to make music that lifted people's spirits.

Country music is full of affairs and cheating; that's where all those Hank Williams songs come from.

Me growing up in the '60s and '70s, there was almost something romantic about drugs, Keith Richards taking drugs and stuff.

He [Johnny Cash] always wanted to use his music to lift other people up, to say no matter how much trouble, there's hope. That was always his message in his songs. That's why he and [Bob] Dylan bonded so much, because they were both trying to do something meaningful.

Voodoo Lounge' is the Stones' most appealing album in years.

I don't want people to say 'goodbye. I start feeling sad like something's past.

Take any celebrity - all we really know is what they choose to tell us, or what they show us in public.

I thought I pretty much knew Johnny Cash's life. But one of my personal discoveries was how little we know about any of these people.