Editor's note: These are answers provided in an interview conducted by Telegraph staff writer Joe Kovac Jr.
I'm a good Southern girl.
My motto is: Everything in moderation, including moderation.
If the music isn't right, you can always kind of mess with that. But if the lyrics aren't there, there's not a whole lot you can do.
It wasn't that cool as a kid to go cruise the Dairy Queen after school because my grandmother worked there.
Songs are like mini movies to me. You tell a story that you can put yourself in as a character in that mini movie for three and a half minutes.
I've never gotten pulled over on Trisha Yearwood Parkway, but I'm thinking if I do I'll be able to talk myself out of a ticket. (It's a speed trap. It's 35 miles an hour there. You've got to be careful.)
I wanted to be Linda Ronstadt - and I still do.
If we could see ourselves through someone else's eyes who loves us, we'd be a lot easier on ourselves.
You owe it to yourself to be intelligent.
My dad had a great sense of humor. ... The older I got, the more he would share jokes with me that he would not have told me when I was younger. He would always have this twinkle in his eye and I knew he was gonna tell me something that he probably shouldn't tell me - and he would always make sure he didn't tell me in front of my mom. She'd heard all the jokes, but he couldn't tell me the jokes in front of her.
I thought everybody's parents were madly in love with each other and laughed a lot and had a great time and liked to spend time with their children.
My sister and I would sit on the tailgate of the truck with hay bales on the back of the truck and ride through the pasture to feed the cows. Our job would be to dump the hay off into the grass as daddy drove the truck along. And cows won't come near you. But if you have hay on the back of a truck, they start charging the truck. We would just scream and be throwing the hay and my dad would just be up there laughing and laughing.
I knew that I wanted to be an entertainer. And at 5 I was absolutely sure I was gonna do it. It's when you get to be 20 that you go, "I don't know if I can do this or not."
I wanted to be Cher for a long time, but not for the singing. I just thought she was so cool. I wanted her long hair and I wanted to weigh 5 pounds.
That word commitment is a word that I don't think I really got until this relationship (with Garth Brooks). I mean, I just don't think I understood that commitment means ... you're gonna go through whatever you have to go through.
My sister, Beth, has a very sweet, angelic voice, and she basically stopped singing with me because I would say, "You're not singing loud enough!" I was always loud.
I was a receptionist. I worked for a record label. And that was wonderful because I was not, and am still not, a really aggressive person. ... I would never be on "American Idol," for instance. I mean, I would never just say, "I'm really great. Would you like to hear me?" ... But when I worked at the record label and nobody knew I was a singer - because I was very shy - I watched people walking in and out of those doors every day doing what I really wanted to be doing and I realized ... if you don't get a little bit aggressive and let somebody know what you want to do, you're gonna get to answer the phones and order Liquid Paper for the rest of your life.
The TV that we grew up with as kids doesn't exist anymore.
One of the first gigs I did was singing in a bowling alley. The name of the bar was The 11th Frame and it connected to a bowling alley. ... If it was bowling-league night, you always had a great crowd until it was their team's turn to bowl, and then your whole crowd would just leave. And if the bowling alley wasn't going, the pool table right next to the stage was going. So right in the middle of your beautiful ballad you'd hear the pool cue crack and somebody cuss.
Don't get married at 20 years old. Give yourself a chance to grow up some, ... to learn who you are before you decide to be with somebody else.
You don't ever need to ask a man, "What are you thinking about?"
The first time I heard myself in an interview, I realized that I wasn't putting a "g" on the end of any of my "i-n-g's." And I'm an honor graduate, you know?
You don't want your friends walking into your house and seeing this shrine to yourself. I would be very uncomfortable to walk in and say, "Well, there's my Grammy right there on the mantel ... and here's my big huge picture of myself."
I was playing a show in High Point, North Carolina, and (Maya Angelou) lives close to there. I got an invitation to come to her house for lunch. I was like, "Which one of my friends is pulling my leg?" I'd never met her before. ... She was very familiar with lyrics of my songs. It was just like sitting in the presence of somebody that just was so wise and so funny and smart. It's almost like I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to sound stupid.
We all want to be liked, but you have to understand that sometimes you have to make a stand for yourself - and it might not be a popular stand.
I was doing an outdoor show in the daytime at a fair, and I was singing a ballad, and these two people that were, I'm sure, married to each other, they got into a fight - a big fight, right in the third row. And I stopped singing. I had to. I felt like their mom. I said, "Look, you can either continue to fight and we'll just stop singing, or you can stop." ... I was singing "Down on My Knees," and after they stopped fighting I said, "We'll come back to that," and went into something up-tempo.
I'm still a singing stick, except now I sort of move left to right on stage. I still don't have the whole showmanship thing down. Thank goodness I can sing on pitch.
You don't have any right to complain when you get to do something that you've dreamed about doing your whole life.
I remember the moment, standing on stage in Italy with Pavarotti standing to my left, and I remember telling myself, "Remember this moment. You have never done anything like this and probably will never do anything like this again."
I'm happy with me. That sounds kind of like a self-help book, but it's important to learn at some point in your life that you're responsible for your own happiness.
Just laugh a lot.
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/living/16954573.htm
She's awesome.
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