Top 40 Dwight Yoakam Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.”

— Dwight Yoakam

2. “Buddy, you might think that I’ve lost my mind. But mister, I’d pay twice to do it one more time.”

— Dwight Yoakam

3. “I’m a thousand miles from nowhere, time don’t matter to me. I’m a thousand miles from nowhere and there’s not place that I want to be.”

— Dwight Yoakam

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

— Dwight Yoakam

5. “I’ve always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.”

— Dwight Yoakam

6. “Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.”

— Dwight Yoakam

7. “In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.”

— Dwight Yoakam

8. “My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.”

— Dwight Yoakam

9. “To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It’s the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it’s the rocket fuel for the track.”

— Dwight Yoakam

10. “No compression or as little as possible – that’s how you get a good recording.”

— Dwight Yoakam

11. “I quit eating red meat a long time ago. I’m a vegetarian, but not by a moral issue or any kind of stand. I still eat dairy. And I quit eating sugar about the same time I quit eating red meat, but I eat fruit.”

— Dwight Yoakam

12. “Another lesson about a naive fool who came to Babylon, and found out that the pie don’t taste so sweet.”

— Dwight Yoakam

13. “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.”

— Dwight Yoakam

14. “Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself.”

— Dwight Yoakam

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

— Dwight Yoakam

16. “I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I’ve seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.”

— Dwight Yoakam

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

— Dwight Yoakam

18. “My parents were not affluent people and were not – didn’t come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she’d come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.”

— Dwight Yoakam

19. “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.”

— Dwight Yoakam

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

— Dwight Yoakam

21. “The future has a lot to do with the past.”

— Dwight Yoakam

22. “It’s meant to reaffirm the validity of that music – clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.”

— Dwight Yoakam

23. “I don’t regret any of the musical decisions I have made.”

— Dwight Yoakam

24. “My music is very personal. I’ve created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound – the expression of loneliness. That’s what it’s all about.”

— Dwight Yoakam

25. “I’ll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.”

— Dwight Yoakam

26. “I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.”

— Dwight Yoakam

27. “Music’s the one thing I try not to analyze. I don’t want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.”

— Dwight Yoakam

28. “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.”

— Dwight Yoakam

29. “I hope that books don’t go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.”

— Dwight Yoakam

30. “Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It’s really, truly, rural white America’s blues.”

— Dwight Yoakam

31. “However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt – if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it – move beyond self-doubt.”

— Dwight Yoakam

32. “We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me – he’d gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.”

— Dwight Yoakam

33. “I’m really proud of it. To me, it’s a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character’s massive survival guilt.”

— Dwight Yoakam

34. “Ironically, the success I’ve experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.”

— Dwight Yoakam

35. “I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a ’64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.”

— Dwight Yoakam

36. “Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.”

— Dwight Yoakam

37. “I needed to get into a nightclub and stand up and present the material that way. I needed to present it live.”

— Dwight Yoakam

38. “As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.”

— Dwight Yoakam

39. “I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular – I can choose that.”

— Dwight Yoakam

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

— Dwight Yoakam

41. “The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That’s what I do.”

— Dwight Yoakam

42. “Control success before it controls you.”

— Dwight Yoakam