Dwight Yoakam

The future has a lot to do with the past.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, 'Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living.'

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.