When I first came to Nashville people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels and we ate when we could.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

The William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh... was the place where Champagne Music was born.

If anyone asks you what kind of music you play tell him 'pop.' Don't tell him 'rock'n'roll' or they won't even let you in the hotel.

It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard 'Heartbreak Hotel' I thought this is it.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

You can be in Tokyo or Alberta at four in the morning in your hotel and you can still practice if you feel like it. A trombone cannot do that at four in the morning.

When I wrote the song I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey.

I still at hotel rooms I do this one sort of not-so-cool thing: continually shoving my room service tray in front of someone else's door. Because I don't want the remnants. I don't want to be caught like being like the pig that I was at two in the morning.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.