Top 66 John Prine Quotes

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

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 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.

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.

There’s nothing I hate more than canceling shows.

I never gave up on ‘Archie.’ I started picking up ‘Archie’ comics when I was in my thirties, and then I started subscribing to them.

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 always feel like every song is the last song.

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

It doesn’t hit you until you pull up to the hospital, and you see ‘cancer‘ in big letters, and you’re the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.

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.

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.

It’s usually drawing on personal experience. I don’t think I could dig deep enough trying to get into somebody else’s life. Like ‘Far From Me’ – I wrote it about this waitress that I was dating when I was fifteen or so, and she broke up with me.

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

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

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 still enjoy the heck out of getting up there to play shows every night.

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

It was always difficult for me to listen to my singing voice for the first 20 years or so. I mean, I really enjoyed singing, and I enjoyed doing live shows, but being in a recording studio and having to hear my voice played back to me would really drive me up the wall.

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

The Songwriters Hall of fame, that’s the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.

Johnny Cash was like Abraham Lincoln to me.

My music has been called so many different things over the years. I figure as long as it’s selling, call it what you want.

You know that first love that leaves you? You never forget that, especially if you’re a songwriter. I must have gotten nine songs out of that girl.

I think it shows when you have to work too hard on a song.

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

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

I was kind of thrown into – I didn’t expect to do this for a living, being a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs. That was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world.

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

My sense of humor has saved me more than a couple of times in my life.

Because of my song ‘Sam Stone,’ a lot of people thought I was interested in writing protest songs. Writing protest songs always struck me as patting yourself on the back.

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

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

I think if you write from your own gut, you’ll come up with something interesting, whereas if you sit around guessing what people want, you end up with the kind of same schlock that everybody else has got.

‘Sam Stone’ is a song about futility.

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

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

After cancer, I ain’t scared of nothing.

In high school, I was a poor student.

In the Army, I was very good at avoiding 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 feel basically good about my career because it’s remained constant. What I do has never been especially in vogue or gotten high on the charts. At the same time, I haven‘t had to stop performing any of my music because it aged in style.

I was a mailman walking in the snow six days a week, 12-hour days. Every two weeks, I’d get a check for $228.

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.

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

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.

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

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.’

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

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

I’m kind of like the Lone Ranger or Batman. I can just go to my mansion and jump out in my uniform and sing on weekends.

‘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.

When I’m writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.

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

I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you.

Never wear your necktie while you’re operating a lathe.

I hate to admit it to my wife, but I only wear two outfits on the road, and then a third one during the day, but I carry about 20.

For me, there’s nothing like performing.

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

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

I think the best duets are those where there’s a dialogue back and forth, and then the two singers go into a thing together.

I had a year-round Christmas tree with nothing but colored vinyl 45s hanging on it, like, old Elvis records and stuff.

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