A Quote by Willie Nelson

I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.
Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton.
I did [picking cotton] from - until I was 18 years old, that is. Then I picked the guitar, and I've been picking it since.
I learned conservatism through my grandfather; I didn't know that was the name. I didn't know these were conservative principles. Starting his life on a sharecropping farm. Working tremendously hard. Five years old, picking cotton and laying tobacco out to dry on a farm, and today he now owns that farm.
I started to work with cotton fabrics. I used cotton because it's easy to work with, to wash, to take care of, to wear if it's warm or cold. It's great. That was the start.
I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons
I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.
I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it.
My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn't too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn't get too much money and I remember he just kept going.
Paper money is made of cotton, and I'm long cotton, by the way. One reason I'm long cotton is because Dr. Bernanke is out there running the printing presses as fast as he can.
On my worst day I always tell myself I'm not in a field picking cotton.
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.
We can work with anybody. I mean, we passed the 9/11 health bill with Tom Cotton. Most people would assume I wouldn't be able to work with Tom Cotton and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
When I'm rhyming it's all in my head... Like the slaves, when they were picking cotton, they would block out their minds. They would sing.
I think life is cotton candy on a rainy day. For those who grew up with cotton candy the old-fashioned way, it is very delicate. Pre-made cotton candy that has preservatives is not nearly as good or true. True cotton candy is sugar, color, and air and it melts very quickly. That was the metaphor - it can't be preserved, it can't be put aside, it can't be banked. It has to be experienced, like life.
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