Top 40 Vince Gill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There ain’t no future in the past.”

— Vince Gill

2. “When you ask a songwriter, “What’s your favorite song?” he goes, “The next one.””

— Vince Gill

3. “Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you’ll have left is your character.”

— Vince Gill

4. “I am responsible for me. I can kind of take care of what I need to do and should do what I like to do.”

— Vince Gill

5. “I don’t chase what everyone else is looking for. Being creative is all about you.”

— Vince Gill

6. “I do not like being famous. I like being normal.”

— Vince Gill

7. “When you lose people that are close to you it brings everything into focus, and the rest kind of gets put on the back burner.”

— Vince Gill

8. “I would love to hear someone write a song like ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ rather than ‘You’re hot. I’m hot. We’re in a truck.’ It’s just mind-numbing to me.”

— Vince Gill

9. “My mom said, “What I want is a happy kid, not a rich kid. That’s what I root for.” She saw how much joy I got from playing music, and those years were leaner than lean!”

— Vince Gill

10. “I don’t want to impress somebody, I want to move somebody. Say the most with the least.”

— Vince Gill

11. “You can’t define the ache that’s in George’s voice. It’s just something inherently him. It doesn’t need definition. It doesn’t need clarification. It doesn’t need a lot of things. You just sit back and appreciate it. It’s just greatness.”

— Vince Gill

12. “The real beauty of it – key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.”

— Vince Gill

13. “Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they’re all geared to play something that matters.”

— Vince Gill

14. “I’ve always been more drawn to being normal than being famous.”

— Vince Gill

15. “At the end of the day, all people want to do is hear a great singer sing a great song. They don’t care about what vocal changes it went through. You can’t screw up a great song and a great singer.”

— Vince Gill

16. “We all get caught up in the process, especially when you have a wave of success. But to me, being creative is not about rehashing everything you’ve done over and over. It’s to continue to grow, continue to get better.”

— Vince Gill

17. “I had just lost my dad and I remembered all the songs we used to go and hear at concerts, and the records around the house and sometimes we’d play together.”

— Vince Gill

18. “Yes, the companionship is amazing. You know, you can get that physical attraction that happens is great, but then there’s an awful lot of time and the rest of the day that you have to fill.”

— Vince Gill

19. “When I look back, I don’t remember the best of the best. I don’t remember arena shows with 20,000 people. I remember funky little bar gigs where nobody shows up. The weirdest of the weird are what you retain.”

— Vince Gill

20. “It is not that I don’t like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.”

— Vince Gill

21. “It would be fun to go back and see where all my songs stopped, because I think I’d have every number in the top 100. It never ceases to amaze me. It still hurts when one doesn’t work, because you put your heart and soul into it.”

— Vince Gill

22. “I’ve always been the high harmony singer. It’s never my job to know the verses! But I know the chorus of every song ever made.”

— Vince Gill

23. “This is just strictly me wanting to make a record that is the real deal. It is all the stuff that I have learned and know that I remember. It’s what I perceive as country music is about.”

— Vince Gill

24. “Through music you learn not to care about the color of someone’s skin.”

— Vince Gill

25. “It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.”

— Vince Gill

26. “Everything I’ve done feels like I’m just as much a part of it as if I was the producer. It’s still the same job: all of us together figuring out the common good for a song. That’s the only thing that matters. It’s not like, “I’m the boss, and I’m gonna tell you what to play.””

— Vince Gill

27. “It’s so much more interesting when you’re human. I hate making mistakes, but I’m not afraid of ’em.”

— Vince Gill

28. “I’m the guy who loves being in the supporting cast.”

— Vince Gill

29. “My last two records that I made were both quite pointed in one direction and I think I do my best stuff when it’s all over the map, when there’s a couple traditional things, a couple pretty rocking things.”

— Vince Gill

30. “I’ve always felt like every note of a song is of equal value.”

— Vince Gill

31. “I never aspired to be up front. When I was a kid, I didn’t ever look in the mirror with a hairbrush going, “Hey, I’m Elvis!””

— Vince Gill

32. “You learn a whole lot more about a person if they have bad breaks and all those kind of things.”

— Vince Gill

33. “Whether it is successful or not is not the exercise for me. It is not up to me. It is out of my hands now. I am not going to in two years have hindsight and say I made a big mistake.”

— Vince Gill

34. “Whether I’m making my own record, or playing a guitar part, I want what I do to have an impact.”

— Vince Gill

35. “And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.”

— Vince Gill

36. “I am not struggling. What I do, it is what I do.”

— Vince Gill

37. “I’m a musician, so for the most part I’ve always thought that the musicians were equally as inspiring to listen to – maybe more so, in some cases – in addition to the artists.”

— Vince Gill

38. “The funny thing is, people’s perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they’re still going to read what they want to into it.”

— Vince Gill

39. “I’ve never been in the studio where it felt like I didn’t have a voice. Whether I was co-producing or producing by myself, this community is the one place where I really see democracy at its purest.”

— Vince Gill

40. “With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.”

— Vince Gill

41. “So I didn’t have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.”

— Vince Gill

42. “It really does take a lot of time to make records, to be in the studio and do all that stuff.”

— Vince Gill

43. “A lot of people play to impress, but the really gifted ones play to move. That’s the greatest point of ever doing this.”

— Vince Gill

44. “I made records in the past that are as traditional as any other country records that have been made, but at the same time the records have a contemporary slant on it too.”

— Vince Gill

45. “I formally proposed. I’m a good Southern gentleman.”

— Vince Gill

46. “The real amazing thing about all of this is I think I’ve maintained the mentality of a musician throughout it all, which I’m proudest of. And I’m still playing on people’s records and singing on people’s records.”

— Vince Gill