“I think for me, beauty is sincerity. I think that there are so many different ways that someone can be beautiful. You know someone’s so funny that it makes them beautiful no matter how they look because they’re sincere in it. Or someone’s really emotional and moody and thoughtful and stoic but that makes them beautiful because that’s sincerely who they are. Or you look out into the crowd and you see someone so happy that they’re smiling from ear-to-ear and that sincerity comes through, and I think that’s what makes somebody beautiful. I’ve never felt like there’s just one way to be beautiful, you know, tall or short, straight hair or curly or whatever, some people have definitions of their “types.” You know, for me, I think that when I meet someone and there’s that magical thing about them that makes them unforgettable, it’s that they’re sincere in honest in whoever they are. Be that funny, happy, sad, going through a rough time, sarcastic, I think these personality traits that come through when somebody is really sincere is what makes them beautiful.”
“Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes. I don’t care. I’m just a senior in high school who has a better job. Who am I to think I’m better than talking to people?”
“I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, “If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.”
“To me, Fearless is not the absense of fear. It’s not being completely unafraid. To me, Fearless is having fears. Fearless is having doubts. Lots of them. To me, Fearless is living in spite of those things that scare you to death.”
“What I’ve learned is not to change who you are, because eventually you’re going to run out of new things to become.”
“You only get so many firsts, Every one is a blessing.”
“The only place where it’s cool to be the same as everyone else is in junior high.”
“Clubs are just not where I want to be photographed. For everything I do, I think about a 6-year-old girl and her mom that I saw at my concert last night. I think about what those two individuals would think if I were at a club last night. I never want to be arrested, and I never want to get a DUI, those are my moral values. I am an over-achiever, and I want to be known for the good things in my life.”
“People haven’t always been there for me but music always has.”
“Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you’ve had a bunch of bad days and there’s different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned completely to music.”
“I write blatantly obvious songs with blatantly obvious details, and then I’m like NO! when they find out, I dunno what’s wrong with me. I have issues.”
“I’m not that complicated. my complications come out in my songs. All you have to do to be my friend is like me…and listen.”
“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.”
“I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive. If you get out of a bad relationship that was a complete waste of time, you can write about it and it can become a benefit to your career. How sweet is that?”
“I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.”
“Everything about this business is exciting to me.”
“I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and kareoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.”
“You know what, if they don’t want me to write bad songs about them, they shouldn’t do bad things.”
“I wrote this song last year about a guy named Stephen who I thought was cute. Sometimes all it takes to write a song about someone is thinking that they’re cute.”
“I hope that I stand for the girl who is 15 and is in school and doesn’t fit in. Maybe she can find some sort of comfort by going home and putting on my CD.”
“I suffer from girlnextdooritis where the guy is friends with you and that’s it.”
(On how to sell 3 million CDs in 2008) “Go to high school and write it all down.”
“My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn’t have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always.”
(When asked how she had the courage to walk up to record labels when she was twelve and thirteen) It’s because I could never feel the kind of rejection in the music industry that I felt in middle school.”
“I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.”
“And Kenny Chesney is so completely nice. Genuinely nice. Like, we were all sitting around the bus after the show and he came up and sat down and talked to us for a while.. and before he left he said “I’m going to get something to eat, y’all want anything?” Like, simple things like that.. It’s just.. really nice. And I really really like nice people.”
“I pulled out my iPod and randomly selected a Grey’s Anatomy episode to watch the pass the time.. And it randomly selected the episode where Denny dies, and so I started hysterically crying and couldn’t stop for about ten minutes. (He was my favorite character, hands down. Why’d he have to die?) For the the record, this is the first time I’ve cried in a VERY long time. So I figure if the only reason I have to cry is a TV show, I must be pretty lucky.”
“(On her win at the 2007 CMT Music Awards) I cannot believe this is happening right now. This is for my MySpace people and everybody who voted. The fans, y’all, I’m going out on tour with Brad Paisley and this is coming with me to every single [autograph] signing line so you can get a picture of the award you won for me. Thank you so much.”
(Upon winning the CMA Horizon Award) “This is definitely the highlight of my senior year!”
“I put absolutely everything I have into this album. These are songs I wrote in my bedroom. I worked on this album for two years, and I can’t believe my name was called! Getting to write every song on an album and having it voted album of the year is an indescribable honor.”
“On being nominated for a CMT award I’m so excited, but really nervous, too! I’ve never been nominated for anything before. I’ve sat in the nosebleed section watching the CMT Awards for two years in a row now, looking down and hoping that maybe if I worked hard enough, I’d get to sit in the awesome seats the nominees get to sit in. And it looks like that’s going down this year!”
“I never want to change so much that people can’t recognize me.”
“I’ve apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It’s been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I’ve found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn’t mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I’ve just added more things to my list
“No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.”
“Words can break someone into a million pieces, but they can also put them back together. I hope you use yours for good, because the only words you’ll regret more than the ones left unsaid are the ones you use to intentionally hurt someone.”
“The world doesn’t owe you anything. You have to work for everything you get and you have to appreciate every bit of success the world gives you”
“I haven’t had that one great love, which is good. I don’t want that to be in the past, I want it to be in the future.”
“I write a lot of songs about love and I think that’s because to me love seems like this huge complicated thing. But it seems like every once in a while, two people get it figured out, two people get it right. And so I think the rest of us, we walk around daydreaming about what that might be like. To find that one great love, where all of a sudden everything that seemed to be so complicated, became simple. And everything that used to seem so wrong all of a sudden seemed right because you were with the person who made you feel fearless.”
“Unique and different is the new generation of beautiful… You dont have to be like everybody else. In fact I don’t think you should.”
“Never believe anyone who tells you that you don’t deserve what you want.”
“For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”
“It was really important for me to go out there and actually say ‘hi’ to people and to thank them for coming and be right there next to them because I’m always gonna wanna go the extra mile for them, because I can’t believe the extra thousand miles they’ve gone for me. That’s one of my favourite things, every single night.”
“If you’re lucky enough to be different, don’t ever change.”
“I wrote a song called ‘Red’ and thinking about what that song means to me and all the different emotions on this album they’re all pretty much about the tumultuous, crazy, insane, intense, semi-toxic relationships I’ve experienced in the last two years. All those emotions fanning from intense love, intense frustration, intense jealousy, confusion, all of that in my mind, all those emotions are red. There’s nothing in between, there’s nothing beige about those feelings and so I called my record that.”
“I think that being good to people – you’ll never regret that. Maybe you’ll get walked all over, maybe you’ll get tricked, maybe you’ll get fooled, but I think it’s so much better to be kind to people and to trust people rather then to have your guard up and say mean things to people. You never want to be the reason that someone else feels bad.”
“I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly, or at medium speed. I either do or I don’t. I don’t think it through, really, which is a good and a bad thing. You don’t look before you leap, which is like, ‘Yay, this is awesome! Let’s not think twice!’ And then you’re like, ‘We used to be flying. Now we’re falling. What’s happening?”