Richard Petty

“Success in life is knowing the difference between ham and eggs; the chicken’s involved, the pig is committed.”

Cotton Owens was leading and daddy was second. They came up on me and I moved over to let them pass. Cotton went on, but daddy bumped me in the rear and my car went right into the wall.

The good Lord doesn’t tell you what His plan is, so all you can do is get up in the morning and see what happens next.

You haven’t been around here long, have you.

NASCAR will make this decision strictly on the greenery, OK? They’ve got no loyalty to one place or another place [as if North Wilkesboro, Rockingham and Darlington need reminding]. They’ve got loyalty to money. And I don’t blame them. I’d do the same thing.

He was at Richmond from the time I was a little boy. He was one of the originals in PR, in working with the drivers and the newspapers. He was one of the first to realize you don’t just stick up a sign and say we’re going to have a race Sunday. He went out, dug up PR and really got the job done. Any time we ran at Richmond, the place was always full.

Even though the album is an endangered species, can we try and make a coherent and good one, even if it’s like making a horse and cart at a Nascar conference?

I don’t know many singers who actually do like the sound of their own voice.

I hear the sound of time roaring past me, …And there is no time to lose.

I wanna sing about something that’s sexy and edgy.

Yeah, I do also think that by the time you are in your forties, what you want to wear and what you think is sexy is not always, like, for another person. It’s what makes you feel good…. Sexy is all relative.

[on Frank Sinatra] He was a compassionate guy. He loved to have fun. He had a movie theatre in his house. We munched on popcorn and watched movies together.

We are following other people’s opinions. We are controlled by the media. And today it all changes.

There are always generic terms like ‘Americana’, but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

Do the NBC bigheads really pay attention to these message boards? Um, I don’t know if they read the message boards. I hope so, because I write fifty to a thousand fake posts a week, mostly, uh, saying that I’m really good and that no else is as good as me. So, I hope they listen to that because I’m trying to get a raise.

There’s probably not a crew chief out there who hasn’t tried something that seemed like a good idea.

They made me use an accent, which I wasn’t thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don’t have them.

My little sister Stella partly looks up to me. She depends on me and I always try to set a good example for her.

I prefer being as far from the centre of celebrity as possible.

At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

If you have paparazzi, you know you’ve gotten somewhere.