Top 45 Kris Kristofferson Quotes

I wish my memory weren’t so bad. They tell me it’s from all the football and boxing and the concussions that I got.

I feel like an old boxer. The brain’s gone, but I can still move around.

I’ve never forgotten a single record I cut or a song I wrote.

Looking back, I’m surprised I had the nerve to do it, but I’m glad I did. Performing the songs and performing in film was just a part of my personality, just like football and boxing at one point in my life. I was able to lose myself in both of them, and that was a good feeling.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I’m thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

Dylan’s relationship with Johnny Cash was the biggest influence on Nashville in my lifetime – they opened up country music.

The one thing I regret is missing the time with my older children when they were young.

If God made anything better than women, I think he kept it for himself.

I feel like I’m kind of lazy, but I keep the yard looking good.

I grew up in a time when people believed in duty, honor and country. My grandfathers were both officers. My father was a General in the Air Force. My brother and I were both in the Army. I’ve always felt a kinship with soldiers; I think it’s possible to support the warrior and be against the war.

As far as fame, the everlasting fame thing. I used to think that was important for a writer… the desire to make your mark.

The most valuable thing to me seems to be time, and with time, I can be great. I have been… and I will be.

I really have no anxiety about controlling my own life.

I used to think that my songs were the best things that I would leave behind me. And I definitely think my kids are now. For starters, they’re writing better songs than I was at their age.

I watched Dylan record ‘Blonde On Blonde’ in my first week at work at CBS. It was just incredible.

Havin’ Dylan cover one of your songs is like being a playwright and having Shakespeare act in your play.

I had a list of rules I made up one time. It says: Tell the truth, sing with passion, work with laughter, and love with heart. Those are good to start with, anyway.

I ended up being friends with all my heroes. Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Johnny Cash – it was incredible.

I’ve tried to be more self-sufficient as I’ve gotten older. I’d like to not worry about whether they’re going to sell my next album or book. Hell, William Blake wasn’t even published in his lifetime.

I never was one to go into an office and write. For one thing, I had a job. I was cleaning the ashtrays and setting up the studios at Columbia for a couple of years and working every other week down in the Gulf of Mexico flying helicopters. I didn’t really get to just write songs for about five years.

My albums really are like scrapbooks to me.

That’s who I wanted to be like was Bob Dylan.

There are a lot of Iraqi people we can never pay back for what we’ve done.

I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.

Look at me! I can go from ‘Donny and Marie’ to Sam Peckinpah to Radio City Music Hall in one week.

I feel like sometimes, when I’m singing a song like ‘Moment of Forever,’ that it goes both to your significant other and to the audience, and was it wonderful for you, you know? I think the best love songs I’ve written work on that level, like ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night.’

I had fought for my independence and fought for my freedom to do as I chose.

When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it’s just the opposite.

Right after I resigned from the Army in 1965, I flew helicopters for oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. I flew personnel from rig to rig, and I’d live on a platform out at sea.

Bobby Bare is one of the greatest people in country music.

Every album I’ve made is about what I’m experiencing at the time.

I think it’s kind of odd that ‘This Old Road’ was the first video I ever did. Because of all of the work I had done in films and everything, you’d think I would have done a video before that.

What really makes me happy now is my home. I know that I have that to lose. But I don’t see losing it. And I don’t care if I never do another movie. And I don’t care if I never get back on the road. I like to think that I’m gonna do that. But if I don’t, I can live with that.

They say the first thing to go is your legs, then it’s your reflexes, then it’s your friends.

Johnny Cash has always been larger than life.

I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters.

My old man worked for Pan American.

I was in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I’ve argued for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the United Farm Workers. I’ve been a radical for a long time. I guess it’s too bad. I’d be more marketable as a right-wing redneck. But I got into this to tell the truth as I saw it.

I have a special place in my heart for Nashville because it saved my life back in the day.

I can interpret my own work honestly. And performing by myself seems to focus the attention in the right places.

I am grateful every morning I wake up. I’ve a big family full of kids, who laugh all the time and love each other.

To do the things that I did, I’m amazed that I had the audacity – like resigning from the Army and becoming a janitor and a songwriter.

Every time I turn on the radio, I must be on the wrong song or something. But, to be honest, since I went on the road back in 1970, I didn’t listen to radio music because I didn’t want to subconsciously steal somebody’s stuff.

I’ve come to appreciate how special a song is compared to other art forms, because you can carry it around in your head and your heart, and it remains part of you. It just comes as natural as a bird to me, always did. It’s the way singer-songwriters make sense of our lives.

There’s a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we’ve moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn’t play me. They were more conservative than I was.