Lucinda Williams

If you come into success too soon, you'll burn out and be finished before you know it. If you let the maturation process happen naturally, you'll be happier with yourself in the end.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

The way I look at life, whatever I'm doing at that time in my life is going to be reflected in my songs, for the most part.

People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.