Willie Nelson Work Quotations

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.

I just enjoy both working and not working. And fortunately, I work enough where I get that out of my system, and then we take a few days off, take a rest.

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.

I think it's true, we have to watch what we're doing. I think if we start out to make what we're trying to do work locally, using local farmers, local people, local control, not going outside and importing a lot of things - everything we need, grow it in the area and be self-sustaining - I think we can probably keep that from happening to a certain degree.

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.