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"I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [...] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [...] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton."
--
Nelson, Willie; Pipkin, Turk (2006). The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart. Gotham. p. 10. ISBN 159240197X. 

 

Willie Nelson

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"Well, there was a guy, a blacksmith, in Abbott, and he and my granddad both had blacksmith's jobs. I hung around there a lot. And he had a family band. He just let me play because he knew I wanted to work and needed the work. So, I played a guitar in a big polka band with a lot of horns and everything. So, fortunately, no one ever heard me, because I wasn't that great. But I was nine or 10 years old and making eight to 10 dollars a night. So, it was easier than picking cotton."

 

Willie Nelson

 

Nooooooah. No, that was a big joke in the family. When I was 16, 17, I started drifting away from everything else and picking up a guitar, and it was like, "What are you doing? You can't sing and you can't play a guitar", right up to the day we got signed by Rough Trade. And then it was like, "Go on play us a song", whereas before it was, "Shut up, f**king racket."

 

Peter Doherty

 

[Nasreddin Hoca is being shaved by an inexperienced barber.]
"One moment, Sir!" said the barber, and he stuck a bit of cotton on the wound. In the next pass of the razor, another bit of the Hoca's cheek went with it. "One moment, sir!" and he stuck a bit of cotton on the second wound. With each stroke of the razor, another bit of cotton joined the crop sprouting on the Hoca's left cheek. "Now," said the barber, "I'll do the other side."

 

Nasreddin

 

The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. We're a fatheaded, cotton-picking society. When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

 

Bill Mauldin

 

It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.

 

Richard Feynman