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"  Raised in Moore, Oklahoma, Keith has &amp;quot;OU,&amp;quot; for the University of Oklahoma, painted on the bottom on his hot tub.   When I started singing &amp;quot;Red, White and Blue,&amp;quot; the lefties attacked me. And then the Right came in with heavy support. The righties said, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re a red Republican, right?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#039;m a Democrat.&amp;quot; And you could smell the brakes and clutches locking down. Whoa! All of a sudden you don&amp;#039;t get Bill O&amp;#039;Reilly and Sean Hannity and the Fox stuff no more. But I don&amp;#039;t see things right-left. I see &amp;#039;em right-wrong. I don&amp;#039;t have an agenda.   There&amp;#039;s 10 percent on each end that make all the noise.   It&amp;#039;s amazing how much power there is in the phrase &amp;quot;boot in your ass.&amp;quot;  My dad always said, &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s ten commandments in the Bible, but if you don&amp;#039;t lie and you don&amp;#039;t steal, the rest of &amp;#039;em pretty much follow suit.&amp;quot;  My mom taught me the serenity prayer. The most important part is &amp;quot;the wisdom to know the difference.&amp;quot; You have to know the difference between things you can control and things you can&amp;#039;t.  I hammered on crossword puzzles until I could work the USA Today one in fifteen minutes. Vocabulary helps you in songwriting. It helps you in business. It helps you in everything.  When somebody comes at me like I&amp;#039;m an ignorant redneck, they find out pretty quick that I can hold an intelligent conversation. I disarm &amp;#039;em and defuse &amp;#039;em and show them how fuckin&amp;#039; narrow-minded they were and how bad a mistake they made by taking a few words I wrote and rollin&amp;#039; &amp;#039;em into a big agenda.  My wife must&amp;#039;ve raised my kids, because they didn&amp;#039;t turn out like me.  I bring people from California and New York to my ranch. They&amp;#039;re so used to being honked at, rushed, and hurried that they can&amp;#039;t believe it when they stop to ask directions and someone calls &amp;#039;em sir and takes the time to show &amp;#039;em how to get where they want to go. Oklahoma is a great place to raise kids.  An oil rig is a baptism into manhood.  If we need to save the planet, let&amp;#039;s save it.  My father wasn&amp;#039;t famous. When he was buried, no celebrities showed up. There were no reporters. But the church held seven hundred people and there was a double overflow. My sister and I ended up holding hands by the hundreds -- we didn&amp;#039;t have time to sit there and weep. How can you not be proud of that?  When I was 15, I went over to this guy&amp;#039;s house to listen to him play some songs he wrote. There were a bunch of girls sitting around just swooning. I could tell they were just average songs. I&amp;#039;m wondering, What are these girls freaking out about? The more I listened, the more I realized it was about the act of creation. The girls thought they could see into his heart and soul. So I started writing songs.  I wrote &amp;quot;Red, White and Blue&amp;quot; in twenty minutes on the back of a fantasy football computer printout.   I&amp;#039;m just a good idea away from a great song.  Interviewed by Cal Fussman, August 4, 2008 RELATED STORIES:  WHAT I&amp;#039;VE LEARNED: More Wisdom and Damn Good Advice from Hundreds of Headliners!   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a5416/toby-keith-quotes-0109/>