Dolly Parton had a way with words — rhyming them in catchy melodies and making people laugh with her wit.
The beloved star is being remembered for her kindness, talent and humor following her death at the age of 80 on Tuesday.
Parton wasn’t shy about making jokes about herself or commenting on her signature look with quick one-liners, like, “It costs a lot to look this cheap.”
But aside from the jokes, she shared wisdom and life lessons over the years. Here are some of the most memorable and inspiring quotes from CBS News interviews with Parton:
Asked how she feels about the love and respect she has from so many people, she told CBS News’ Gayle King in 2022, “It’s an honor, but it scares me to death sometimes.”
“I’m always saying, I’m not all that, I’m even not all there sometimes,” she joked. “But it makes me feel good that I’ve been around long enough for people to feel like they know me and they’ve just kind of accepted me, and now that I’m older, they just kind of think of me as like an older sister or a favorite aunt and I’m glad to play that role.”
Parton often said she patterned her look after what she described as “the town tramp” she saw growing up.
“She wore the makeup, red nails, red high heels, tight clothes. I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” Parton said in 2016. “And people say, ‘Oh, she ain’t nothing but trash,’ but in my mind, I thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.'”
When it came to fashion, Parton told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell in 2023 that she just wore what she liked.
“I don’t care about following fashion,” she said. “I’ve never been one to follow what other people are doing. … I just had my own personality, my own thought of who I was and how I wanted to look. I laugh out loud when people say I’m a fashion icon ’cause I never intended for that to happen.”
“I often say I’m comfortable in my own skin no matter how far I’ve stretched it as the years go by,” she told O’Donnell. “But I think there’s a lot to be said about being comfortable with who you are ’cause I don’t know how to be anybody else. I don’t want to be anybody else.”
“I’m not a genius. That just runs in my blood,” Parton told O’Donnell about her songwriting. “I have a gift of rhyme. … I always, to make a joke, I said, ‘I’ve got at least 3,000 songs and three good ones.’ That’s pretty much true.”
She often said songwriting was natural for her.
“I couldn’t stop writing songs if I wanted to,” she said.
If people mistakenly thought “I Will Always Love You” was Whitney Houston’s song, Parton said she doesn’t take offense.
“I say, ‘You got that right,'” she said in 2016. “And other people they kind of say, ‘No, that’s Dolly Parton’s song.’ I said, ‘Look, she can have the credit. I just want the cash.’ And I made plenty of it all off of Whitney, thank God.”
“I live my spirituality, you know, that’s how you practice it mostly. You just live it and be it,” she said in 2023. “The kingdom of heaven is inside. It’s right inside of you and you can draw from that, that wisdom, whether you call it God or higher wisdom or a higher knowing. There’s something bigger than you. I just think you just need to claim it and live it. And you can apply that to whatever you do. I don’t think you have to be a saint. I don’t think you have to be so strict that you can’t have fun. You know, it’s all about the intent of your heart.”
Parton told CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil in 2019 she didn’t regret not having children.
“It wasn’t meant to be. And I don’t regret it. I never regretted it,” she said. “I mean, it was a choice. So, you make your choices, you make your sacrifices, and I never looked back. I knew early on that I was going to walk that road ’til God told me to stop. And I’m still walking it, and He ain’t said nothing to me about quitting yet.”
“I tell everything I feel that the people need to know and I’m honest in what I say. I just don’t always tell everything I know. If you didn’t think to ask it, I ain’t going to volunteer it. I have to save some for me,” she said in 2023.
“I never know what’s next. I always say that I wake up with new dreams every day and the people that work around me say, ‘Yeah, I know, your dreams are about to kill us,'” she joked in 2023. “I’m always dreaming. I’m always doing, and I hope to do that ’til the day I die.”
“I’d like to be thought of as a decent human being,” Parton told CBS News’ Anthony Mason in 2024. “When you think of me when I’m gone, I’d like you to smile, to think, ‘Oh, she was funny,’ or ‘Oh, she had a good sense of humor, you know, when she was sad, she’d make a joke about it.'”
She said she wanted to be known as “just a regular person.”
“I always say I’m a workhorse that looks like a show horse,” she said. “I just hope I leave something good behind for other people to enjoy and to draw from.”
