Taylor Swift

“While I was backstage before presenting the Best New Artist award, I talked to George Strait for a while. He's so incredibly cool. So down-to-earth and funny. I think it should be known that George Strait has an awesome, dry, subtle sense of humor. Then I went back out into the crowd and watched the rest of the show. Keith Urban's new song KILLS ME, it's so good. And when Brad Paisley ran down into the front row and kissed Kimberley's stomach (she's pregnant) before accepting his award, Kellie, my mom, and I all started crying. That's probably the sweetest thing I've ever seen.I thought Kellie NAILED her performance of the song we wrote together "The Best Days of Your Life". I was so proud of her. I thought Darius Rucker's performance RULED, and his vocals were incredible. I'm a huge fan. I love it when I find out that the people who make the music I love are wonderful people. I love Faith Hill and how she always makes everyone in the room feel special. I love Keith Urban, and how he told me he knows every word to "Love Story" (That made my night). I love Nicole Kidman, and her sweet, warm personality. I love how Kenny Chesney always has something hilarious or thoughtful to say. But the real moment that brought on this wave of gratitude was when Shania Twain HERSELF walked up and introduced herself to me. Shania Twain, as in.. The reason I wanted to do this in the first place. Shania Twain, as in.. the most impressive and independent and confident and successful female artist to ever hit country music. She walked up to me and said she wanted to meet me and tell me I was doing a great job. She was so beautiful, guys. She really IS that beautiful. All the while, I was completely star struck. After she walked away, I realized I didn't have my camera. Then I cried. You know, last night made me feel really great about being a country music fan in general. Country music is the place to find reality in music, and reality in the stars who make that music. There's kindness and goodness and....honesty in the people I look up to, and knowing that makes me smile. I'm proud to sing country music, and that has never wavered. The reason for the being.. nights like last night.”

“So to you, or anyone else who has spent four minutes on me in some way-- listening to just one song, or watching one of my videos….Thank you. I love you like I love sparkles and having the last word. And that's real love.”

“These days, I've been trying to classify my thoughts into two categories: "Things I can change," and "Things I can't." It seems to help me sort through what to really stress about. But there I go again, over-planning and over-organizing my over-thinking! I write songs about my adventures and misadventures, most of which concern love. Love is a tricky business. But if it wasn't, I wouldn't be so enthralled with it. Lately I've come to a wonderful realization that makes me even more fascinated by it: I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to love. No one does! There's no pattern to it, except that it happens to all of us, of course. I can't plan for it. I can't predict how it'll end up. Because love is unpredictable and it's frustrating and it's tragic and it's beautiful. And even though there's no way to feel like I'm an expert at it, it's worth writing songs about -- more than anything else I've ever experienced in my life.”

“I rode an elevator with a guy who was whistling the tune of 'this is the song that never ends'. Putting that on me? Come on dude..”

“Mom is calculated, logical, business-minded; kind but very, very direct. Makes you better by giving you these little pointers but doesn’t baby you. My dad is a Chatty Cathy, the social butterfly; friendly; knows everybody in the whole world by six degrees; tells me that every performance is the greatest he’s ever seen, every new outfit is the coolest. Constant cheerleader. It’s cool to have pie-in-the-sky Dad, down-to-earth Mom.”

“Beauty is sincerity.There are so many different ways someone can be beautiful.”

“Mom is a planner, an organizer. She's very strong and practical. She's the person that'll tell me if I ever start to change my personality. The balance of the two of them created my personality.”

“My dad is adorably optimistic, positive, pie-in-the-sky. He thinks every new song I write is my best. He sells T-shirts at my merchandise stands and hands out guitar picks to fans.”

“See, the thing is I didn't think that that song would get much attention because it's such a personal song to me. I just wrote it about my childhood, and I didn't know how that would read on an album. But it's been everybody's favorite song. I didn't tell my mom. It was a total secret. So I wrote it in secret and then decided to record it secretly, so she had no idea that the song was recorded. My producers sent me the track and I synched it up to all my baby videos and I played it for her one Christmas Eve, and she bawled her eyes out. She didn't even think that it was my song. She didn't think there was any way for me to record a song without her knowing.”

“I began absolutely non-stop tormenting my parents, begging them on a daily basis to move there.”

“Keeping your emotions all locked up is something that’s unfair to you. When you clearly know how you feel. You should say it.”

“My parents have always been very respectful of me so I’ve always been really respectful of them. My worst fear is to let them down so that’s why I don’t misbehave.”

“I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.”

“The song was about a girl who didn't fit in and she didn't care and she was different than everyone else. I think there's a long chorus of me singing "Do do do do do do do do do do". It's very young and I look back and it's kind of interesting to hear those kind of storylines and the lyrics that I used to write compared to the lyrics that I write now.”

“She was actually a recording star in Puerto Rico when my mom was growing up. My mom was always stuck sitting backstage somewhere or sitting in a front row, watching a performance her entire childhood. She thought that when her mom stopped performing she was relieved of those duties, but all I wanted to do was sing, ever since I was born, so she's always been backstage.”

“Yes! I did [grow up on a Christmas Tree farm], so this is a good season for me. I was too young to help with the hauling of the trees up the hills and putting them onto cars. So, it was my job to pull off the preying mantis pods off of the Christmas trees. The problem with that is if you leave them on there, people bring them into their house. I forgot to check one time and they hatched all over these people’s house. And there were hundreds of thousands of them. And they had little kids, and they couldn’t kill of them because that’d be a bad Christmas.”

“In middle school, my friends decided I was weird, and they didn’t like my hair. They ditched me and talked behind my back, which is cool — I’m over it. [laughs] One time I called them and said, “Hey, do you want to go to the Berkshire Mall?” They all gave me excuses and said no. So I go to the mall with my mom, and don’t you know, we run into all of them. Together. Shopping. My mom could see I was about to cry, so she said, “You know what? We’re going to the King of Prussia mall,” which was the mecca. ”

“It was an actual Christmas tree farm. We had, like, 15 acres. It was really fun as a kid. I also spent my summers at the Jersey Shore, on the bay in Stone Harbor. I walked everywhere barefoot. It was just the most amazing, magical way to grow up.”

“There are two ways you can go with pain: You can let it destroy you or you can use it as fuel to drive you… ”

“Lady gagas "hair" is my theme song.”

“Dude, my hair is like an architectural structure. It’s like… a building.”

“I realized that I have very long arms so I can take the perfect arm-length picture with fans”

“Never never never compare yourself to the beautiful girls. There's always someone gorgeous who will make you feel like you're not. It's a total confidence buster!”

“I always thought I'd be really fun to sing a song with Miley.”

“I'm not going to be that person who wants one thing their whole life, and then gets it and complains about.”

“Don’t worry. You may think you’ll never get over it. But you also thought it would last forever.”

“I wouldn’t wear tiny amounts of clothing in my real life, so I don’t think it’s necessary to wear that stuff in photo shoots.”

“Living alone, you can do so many fantastic things I’ve learned. You can like, walk around and have so many conversations with yourself and sing your thoughts. I think I’m the only one that does that…”

“My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there.”

“There are videos where I would go approaching strangers and sing the songs from 'The Lion King. I would have been about four years, and I came running up to people on the beach, strangers that I chose at random and began to sing, and my family never knew where I was, they were always looking for me, trying to imagine who I was harassing this time .”

“It was a time of great loneliness. He had a group of friends, and suddenly I had no one and did not understand why. I felt excluded. Some days, the majority was in high school and did not know who to talk to. And that is something really terrible when you're twelve years old.”

“I watched their reactions and emotions, especially to understand what was what I was doing wrong. But then I realized that if I could see these people and take note of everything I saw, I could write a good song. ”

“Never believe anyone who tells you that you don't deserve what you want.”

“When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.”

“There's always that seventh-grade girl who looks like she's 25. And you're like, How do you do it? How do you do it, Sarah Jaxheimer?Why is your hair always so shiny?!”

“So . . . middle school? Awkward. Having a hobby that's different from everyone else's? Awkward. Singing the national anthem on weekends instead of going to sleepovers? More awkward. Braces? Awkward. Gain a lot of weight before you hit the growth spurt? Awkward. Frizzy hair, don't embrace the curls yet? Awkward. Try to straighten it? Awkward!So many phases!”

“When we meet someone and we fall in love we don’t ever imagine that it’s going to end.”

“When I was in high school, I remember seeing girls crying in the bathroom every Monday about what they did that weekend. I never wanted to be that girl crying in the bathroom.”

“That’s always the hardest thing when someone completely has you fooled so much, that you think they’re just never going to hurt you, then they do. That’s when you get the worst heartbreak.”

“In any relationship each person should support the other; they should lift the other up.”

“My parents raised me to never feel like I was entitled to success.That you have to work for it. You have to work so hard for it. And sometimes then you don't even get where you need to go.”

“I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it to feel sane.”

“Be yourself. There is no one better.”

“My dad (Scott Swift) believed in me, even when I didn't.He always knew I could do this. I’m sure that everyone in Reading remembers how much he talked about me. I thought that was sweet, but really I just wasn’t as sure it would happen. So, I just love my dad for believing in his little girl.”

“Hendersonville is home because I live there and I work there. But when I come back to Pennsylvania and see the crowds and the landscape, it's such a rush. It just feels like home.”

“She's like a sister. People say we're such opposites, but that's what makes us such good friends. She's incredibly blunt. I love that about her. If some guy has said or done something to me she doesn't like, she'll grab my cell phone and say, 'I'm deleting his number.”

“I can remember her singing, the thrill of it," she said. "She was one of my first inspirations.The people around me provided all the inspiration I needed. Everything I wrote (at that time) came from that experience, what I observed happening around me.”

“When I was 9 or 10, I used to get all the lead roles because I was the tallest person. But my interest in music soon drew me to country music. I was infatuated with the sound, with the storytelling. I could relate to it. I can't really tell you why. With me, it was just instinctual.”

“I didn't have friends. No one talked to me. I used to go to the Wyndcroft School (nationally recognized for academic excellence) in Pottstown, and when I moved to Wyomissing, I didn't know anybody.”

“I got to play Kim in Bye Bye Birdie, Sandy in Grease, and Maria in The Sound of Music. And it was so much fun for me, but the thing that I looked forward to the most was at the cast parties. After the shows they had karaoke machines set up and that's when I could sing country music.”