Vicente Fernandez

I will live my whole life in Mexico. I want that to be clear.

I've recorded 25 to 30 songs in a single night, singing five or six takes of each song. I'm very disciplined.

I have many hits, big hits, that have been written by people I don't know. In almost all my shows, people say, 'Chente, here's a CD.' When I get home, I listen to them all, and what I like, I record.

I abide to God's will and I feel that from up above, God and my parents have guided my career.

Everything evolves. I'll always sing ranchera, but as an artist, you want to explore, to do the most that you can.

No one will ever be able to say, 'Ay, Chente, he's all washed up. He should have thrown in the towel years ago.'

When you're a ranchera singer, you represent your country. It's a God-given gift.

With the education I had, all I could do was work as a burro, in whatever I could find: shoeshine boy, janitor, dishwasher, waiter, bartender, cashier, bricklayer, painter.

I've always said there aren't great composers- there are great songs.

It gives me great pleasure to team up with a friend like Budweiser that shares with me the same values and vision that help empower the Hispanic community - higher learning and education.

When I hear the public's applause, I don't know where the voice comes from, but it does for three hours.

I've always said I got to where I am not by being a great singer, but by being stubborn, by being tenacious, by being pigheaded.

Some of my earliest memories, from when I was six or seven, are of going to see Pedro Infante movies and telling my mother, 'When I grow up I want to be like them.'

They wanted to give me some other man's liver, and I told them 'I'm not going to sleep next to my wife with another man's liver.'

When I come to America, I feel like I'm coming to visit family, to bring a reminder of home to those who can't be there.

I accept recording with everybody, as long as it's with a mariachi.

Everybody who sings with me has to sing ranchero. Roberto Carlos had to sing ranchero, Vikki Carr had to record ranchero. Celia Cruz came in with a mariachi.

There are other singers of ranchera music who sing very beautifully, but you can tell from the way they sing that they never lived on a ranch. They never knew what it was to milk a cow, to birth a calf, to shoe a horse. I've lived all that.

I think the United States is extremely important for Mexican music.

I would love to be on Oprah or Larry King.

I want to do interviews in English, but I want to sing in Spanish. I think it could work.

I could attempt a project in English, but I'd like to continue singing in Spanish.

For me, putting on my charro outfit is a matter of pride and it's a very big responsibility.

When I started my career, I always had the confidence that I would one day make it, but I never imagined that I would reach the heights at which the public has placed me.

From my country, they will only take me out feet first.