Robert Hilburn Quotes

#1. We all have very different musical DNA, and we all follow different musical paths. Yet there is a unifying quality about rock'n'roll that helps instill confidence and hope in millions of fans at times in their lives when little else makes sense.

Robert Hilburn

#2. I thought I pretty much knew Johnny Cash's life. But one of my personal discoveries was how little we know about any of these people.

Robert Hilburn

#3. He [Johnny Cash] always wanted to use his music to lift other people up, to say no matter how much trouble, there's hope. That was always his message in his songs. That's why he and [Bob] Dylan bonded so much, because they were both trying to do something meaningful.

Robert Hilburn

#4. Cash said in return, "I'm a songwriter. I use my imagination. The important thing is the message of the song, not the imagery.

Robert Hilburn

#5. Take any celebrity - all we really know is what they choose to tell us, or what they show us in public.

Robert Hilburn

#6. Country music is full of affairs and cheating; that's where all those Hank Williams songs come from.

Robert Hilburn

#7. Cash said he was someone "made up of bad parts but was trying to do good.

Robert Hilburn

#8. At times, Singer Johnny Cash rubbed dirt from the earth under his fingernails in order to avoid any arrogance which might stem from his fame, by reminding himself of his roots and origins.

Robert Hilburn

#9. There was a lot of sorrow in [Johnny] Cash's life. Even while he's trying to make music to inspire people he's fighting day after day with his own demons and sorrows.

Robert Hilburn

#10. I think it is hard to find happiness, as a whole, in anything. The days of tender youth are gone. I think you can be delirious in your youth, but as you get older, things happen.

Robert Hilburn

#11. It's important to realize that everybody who went into country music, and most everybody who went into rock and roll in the '50s, they had no more goal than a hit on the jukebox. Johnny Cash from the very beginning had a goal that he wanted to make music that lifted people's spirits.

Robert Hilburn

#12. Bono and Clayton had such a great time that the band paid homage to Cash in their Rattle and Hum album package with a huge photo of them in the Sun studio just beneath a framed photo of Phillips and Cash. In the early weeks of 1993, Bono was working

Robert Hilburn

#13. It was just a week after the Columbia decision that Cash's life would take another seismic shift: he would take his first amphetamine.

Robert Hilburn

#14. Me growing up in the '60s and '70s, there was almost something romantic about drugs, Keith Richards taking drugs and stuff.

Robert Hilburn