I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven’t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Writing ‚We Are Never Getting Back Together‘ was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

I think the first thing you should know is that nobody in country music ‚made it‘ the same way. It’s all different. There’s no blueprint for success, and sometimes you just have to work at it.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

The song ‚Innocent‘ is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

When I’m stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

I’ve never thought about any kind of prejudice about women in country music because I never felt like it affected me. I was fortunate enough to come about in a time when I didn’t feel that kind of energy at all, and it was always my theory that if you want to play in the same ballgame as the boys, you’ve got to work as hard as them.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

Seeing a live Kenny Chesney show, you know what you’re going to get. You know it’s going to be an all-day party.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

Kitty Wells was the first and only Queen of Country Music, no matter what they call the rest of us. She was a great inspiration to me as well as every other female singer in the country music business. In addition to being a wonderful asset to country music, she was a wonderful woman.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

I write music every day.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.