Top 60 John Prine Quotes

I’m not good at remembering things, in general.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n’ roll lifestyle.

Soon as I could play one guitar chord and laid my ear upon that wood, I was gone. My soul was sold. Music was everything from then on.

I embraced loneliness as a kid. I know what loneliness is. When you’re at the end of your rope. I never forget those feelings.

I did three club tours before I started playing concert halls, and the clubs were half full the first time around.

After a couple bouts with cancer and everything, black cats are nothin’, you know?

All the girls over there in Ireland are well versed in American country music. Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline are like king and queen over there.

I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it’s real before I put it down on paper.

I wrote most of ‘Hello in There’ in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I’d go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on ‘Hello in There’ inside the relay box.

Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.

If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.

I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people’s songs.

You get to thinking that because you’ve written 50 or 100 songs, you think maybe you know how to do it. But when they’re not coming along, you’re just as in the dark as you ever were. When they’re coming along, there’s nothing to it. Sometimes it’s so easy, it’s like you’re a court stenographer.

I didn’t hear anybody talking about the plight of a soldier coming back home and what he’d gone through. That was why I wrote about that stuff. If somebody else had done it, I probably wouldn’t have touched the subject.

I never fit in with straight country. I never really fit in with rock n’ roll. I’ve always been somewhere in between all this stuff.

Howie Epstein was a kind, patient, and extremely talented musician. He took two years out of his life and dedicated his undivided attention to the making of two of my records. Those records changed my life thanks to Howie.

The only time I ever think about getting old is when I look in the mirror. I feel pretty good about it, actually.

Yeah, early ’71 is when I got my record contract. I had a record come out by August of ’71. Things happened really fast.

As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.

I don’t like to be caught without a pick.

When I’m making my own record, it’s real work for me.

There’s nothing I hate more than canceling shows.

In high school, I was a poor student.

‘Sam Stone’ is a song about futility.

My first Grammy nomination? I was 24 – I was nominated for best new artist of the year.

Along the way, we have had some wonderful adventures and have met thousands of dedicated fans – indeed, many of them feel like family to us now.

I don’t like to see Christmas trees torn down.

I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.

Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman were the two most unselfish people I ever met.

I’ve been fortunate enough to always have plenty of work, offers to go out and play shows. The hardest thing I have to do is pick out which one I want. For some reason, there’s a great demand out there, whether I’ve got a new record out or not.

I could never teach a class on songwriting. I’d tell them to goof off and find a good hideout.

When I turned 40, I invited Johnny Cash to my party, even though I knew there was gonna be 200 people roasting a pig and wild as can be. He didn’t come, but the next day, I got a bowl of chili he’d made and a note that said, ‘John, I’d love to come to your party, but that would mean I would have to leave my house.’

I’d rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.

When I was a mailman, writing songs was my escape from the regular world, and now writing songs is my job. And I’ve always been one to avoid my job.

I became a recording artist before I knew it. And I just – when I would listen to my old records, I’d just hear this young, extremely nervous fella that that made me want to run out of the room, you know, rather than listen to what he had to say.

I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn’t go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.

The only reason I figured out I didn’t like my old records to listen was I could hear how nervous I was and how uncomfortable I was. And who would want to sit around and listen to yourself being uncomfortable?

I thought I was grounded. I thought from my kinda blue-collar outlook on life that I would call myself a grounded person. I was not. I was like a balloon flying around in the air. And as soon as our first child was born, boom – my feet came right down to the ground.

There’s only two things. There’s life, and there’s death.

I just like a good, sad song. The sadder, the better. It moves me.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

‘The Ways of a Woman in Love’ is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl’s house and wishing he was the one in her arms.

If you listen to people talk, when people actually talk, they talk in melodies. If they get angry, their voice rises, and it’s more of a staccato thing. When they ask for something, they’re real sweet. It’s all music.

I always feel like every song is the last song.

I’ll go to the movies and hear ‘Angel From Montgomery’ in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don’t tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don’t have to, so they don’t tell you. You get paid eventually.

The more producers I talked to, the more I got looked at like I was crazy for wanting to make a live-sounding album.

In the Army, I was very good at avoiding my job!

When you’re singing somebody else’s songs, it’s just pure joy to me.

I have to have something that really excites me in order to write about it.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.

If somebody tells me to work or exercise, I go the other way. I’ll come up with an excuse.

When I was a boy, my family used to watch a lot of Laurel and Hardy.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.

I don’t concern myself with where I fit in. I just keep my head down and keep doing whatever it is I’m going.

Even when I was coming up in the singer-songwriter ranks during the early ’70s, I thought that people who were stylists and stuff shoulda still been up on the pedestal. I mean, it’s fine to recognize people who write songs, but it kinda got out of hand, you know?

I sound like that old guy down the street that doesn’t chase you out of his apple tree.

People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.

There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

One time, I went to school, and they asked us all to find out where our roots were. It’s goin’ around the class, and the kids were going, ‘I’m Swedish-German’ or ‘I’m English-Irish.’ They got to me and I said, ‘Pure Kentuckian.’