Taylor Swift

There's a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

When I get on a roll with something, it's really hard for me to put it down unfinished.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I'm proud of.

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

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it's a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

I put out one album one week, and I'm already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that's happening to me, and some days I feel everyone's waiting for me to mess up.

I've always been really, really aware of my insecurities - really, really aware. I never developed that thick skin that keeps you from letting things get to you.

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

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

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

I'm the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that's horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

I love being a part of the country-music community.

I didn't always have 14,000 people wanting to hang out with me on a Saturday night.

I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written... Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn't have much of a social life going on.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It's just funny. And wonderful.

If there's a pregnancy rumor, people will find out it's not true when you wind up not being pregnant, like nine months from now, and if there's a house rumor, they'll find out it's not true when you are actively not ever spotted at that house.

People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like - that's a thing that I apparently do. If I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me.

Katie Couric is one of my favorite people.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what's really happening to me, even if it's a tough pill to swallow for people around me... I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I have to work really hard to get the record deal - I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

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

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I'm concerned, love is absolutely everything.

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.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone's singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That's the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink - boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

I don't like to feel like I'm some fragile package that has to be shipped by high-priority mail and handled with white gloves.

There's so much about Dolly Parton that every female artist should look to, whether it's reading her quotes or reading her interviews or going to one of her live shows. She's been such an amazing example to every female songwriter out there.

I've always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little.

'Love Story' is actually about a guy that I almost dated. But when I introduced him to my family and my friends, they all said they didn't like him. All of them!

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 think Kenny Chesney or Garth Brooks would be the coolest duet partners. I look up to them so much for their work ethics.

I was never a boy magnet at school. There was always the girl all the guys liked and wanted to date, but it was never me.

You can't generalise about an entire country, but I like the energy of British men.

I've found that men I've dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I've found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren't competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been... challenging.

I've had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it's not what I look for when I'm seeing someone.

As supportive as my hometown is, in my high school, there are people who would probably walk up to me and punch me in the face. There's a select few that will never like me. They don't like what I stand for. They don't like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy. They're going to be negative no matter what.

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.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

I'm never in the same place for more than, like, three days at a time. Things can change from one minute to the next.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.

I've made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I'm allowed to write my own music.

I have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they're actresses or singers or things like that.

I think, a lot of times when you meet someone, you feel like you need to appear like you're not interested in them so that they'll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What's he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don't want to sign up for that.

Every single one of us has a few months here or there that feel like dark months.

My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.

So many girls come up and say to me, 'I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn't even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I'm obsessed.' That's the coolest compliment to me.

I'm a girls' girl. I have guy friends, but the problem with having guy friends is, like, I always get linked to them, and they'll end up in a slideshow of people I've apparently dated on the Internet.