Top 40 Tom T. Hall Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s Faster horses, Younger women, Older whiskey and More money.”

— Tom T. Hall

2. “A song is a poem set to music.”

— Tom T. Hall

3. “I was quite a reader before I became a writer.”

— Tom T. Hall

4. “Me and Jesus got our own thing going on. We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about.”

— Tom T. Hall

5. “Old dogs care about you, even when you make mistakes.”

— Tom T. Hall

6. “I love winners when they cry, losers when they try.”

— Tom T. Hall

7. “I love coffee in a cup, little fuzzy pups, bourbon in a glass, and grass.”

— Tom T. Hall

8. “God bless little children while they’re still too young to hate.”

— Tom T. Hall

9. “It is so important for me to try, and having tried I look back on failure and success as if it were all the same.”

— Tom T. Hall

10. “I’m a very comfortable and happy-go-lucky old man. I never wanted to be great, because I’d just get worried.”

— Tom T. Hall

11. “Young kids are doing the same thing I did, but they’re doing it differently. They don’t do brain surgery the way they used to do it either.”

— Tom T. Hall

12. “The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn’t been any such thing.”

— Tom T. Hall

13. “I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I’d pick out an author and I would read all their books.”

— Tom T. Hall

14. “The enticing allure of Nashville is that there is always something new coming down the pike. Put this record on and you’ll hear footsteps.”

— Tom T. Hall

15. “My theory is if you have a religion, it’s a good one. Because some people don’t have any at all.”

— Tom T. Hall

16. “I never hid out. I was never big enough a star.”

— Tom T. Hall

17. “Songwriting is as much a craft as a talent.”

— Tom T. Hall

18. “I never fixed a story. I didn’t make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.”

— Tom T. Hall

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

19. “People think because you’re private, you have something you don’t want them to know.”

— Tom T. Hall

20. “The first time with artistic endeavors is, if it’s working, it was your idea, and if it’s not, it’s somebody else’s idea.”

— Tom T. Hall

21. “Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?”

— Tom T. Hall

22. “Religion is a strange, wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion.”

— Tom T. Hall

23. “If Barbara Walters was interviewing me, I’d figure her career was as dead as mine!”

— Tom T. Hall

24. “A monkey was the President, though maybe not the first. And there was peace and harmony throughout the universe.”

— Tom T. Hall

25. “My best album is called In Search Of A Song. That was my best shot right there. My finest hour, as they say. I could listen to the whole thing all the way through. There’s nothing really crammed into it.”

— Tom T. Hall

26. “I have my own religion. I’m sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish.”

— Tom T. Hall

27. “The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.”

— Tom T. Hall

28. “I am a fan of history.”

— Tom T. Hall

29. “It used to be that youd have a song recorded by a major country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership.”

— Tom T. Hall

30. “I don’t know why songwriters struggle. They have to, I guess. If you’re a young songwriter, quit struggling. It makes you look bad.”

— Tom T. Hall

31. “After I retired and came off the road, I gathered up all my musical instruments and suddenly, I wanted them all to be perfect.”

— Tom T. Hall

32. “When you retire, it’s a place in life, a part of the journey. You just don’t quit work; you develop an attitude where you can do what you please.”

— Tom T. Hall

33. “I have had hundreds of people work for me over the years, and I don’t think I ever fired anybody.”

— Tom T. Hall

34. “She gave her heart to Jethro and her body to the whole wide world.”

— Tom T. Hall

35. “This generation should entertain this generation. It’s only fair. When I was a kid, I mowed the lawn. Now, somebody else’s kid can mow the lawn.”

— Tom T. Hall

36. “I knew a lot of chords, but they weren’t the chords that came with the melody that came with the idea I had for the song. Melodies are simple things. If you see a train wreck, there’s a melody. If you see a little daisy blowing in the breeze, there’s a melody.”

— Tom T. Hall

37. “I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.”

— Tom T. Hall

Featured in: Reading Quotes

38. “Nobody knows a hit before it’s a hit.”

— Tom T. Hall

39. “Make your melodies simple enough so that the average person can hum them.”

— Tom T. Hall

40. “I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.”

— Tom T. Hall

41. “The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I’m sure of that.”

— Tom T. Hall