“Johnny Cash had all of the same talents and problems as Elvis - a poor upbringing in the rural South exposure to gospel music throughout his childhood a penchant for drug abuse...they had the same sort of influencing experiences but Johnny' Cash's problematic relationship was with his father not his mother. If he had had the mommy issues that Elvis had instead of a compelling need to prove himself to his father, he wouldn't have been the badass man in black, the guy in Folsom Prison watching the train roll by. Elvis was a lot of things but even with the karate and the gunplay he was more unstable than badass.”

“When making his music, he [Elvis Presley] had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scrips for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.”

“Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.”

“In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely. What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.”

“Once upon a time, each of us was somebody's kid. Everyone had a father, even if he never provided anything more than his seed.Everyone had a mother, even if she had to leave us on a stranger's doorstep.No matter how we're eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way.They all end the same, too.”

“He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.”