Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by John Prine - Page 2

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

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.

To tell you the truth, the nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame totally surprised me. I had no idea that was coming. I know a lot of people like to say it's enough just to be nominated. But I've been nominated for so many things, I'd like to get this one. I think it's a long shot, considering I never had a No. 1 rock n' roll record.

For me, there's nothing like performing.

I always had an affinity for older people. I had a job delivering newspapers, and one place I had to go was an old people's home. Some people would introduce you to their neighbors as if you were a nephew or grandson. They didn't get many visitors, so they acted like you were coming to see them. And that stuck with me for a long time.

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 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.

Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.

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

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

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.'

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?

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.

I think I've finally, after 72 years, gotten used to my voice, and it sounds like a friend now instead of an enemy.

I can't really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that's man-made. I'm a writer, too; that's how I look at the Bible. Like, 'I could've written a better version than that,' you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.

'Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

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.

People thought we were crazy for starting a record company. They really thought I was shooting myself in the foot.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

My fans have always taken care of me.

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

There's nothing I hate more than canceling shows.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I can blame a lot of things for not writing songs, but cancer isn't one of them.

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.

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.

I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.

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

After cancer, I ain't scared of nothing.

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

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

If heartaches was commercials, we'd all be on TV.

You can fool some of the people part of the time in a rock and roll song, fifty million Elvis Presley fans can't be all wrong.

Some of the songs come so fully, it's like they are pre-packaged. There have been a couple that came in the middle of the night. And I thought, jeez, I'll never forget that. And went back to sleep, and it was gone. You'll hear something years later that another songwriter that you respect writes, and you go, jeez, I think that was the remnants of that song that got sent to me.

I'm fascinated by America...it's so odd.

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was.

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

Now Jesus, he don't like killing, no matter what the reason is for, and your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore.

How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say

Blow up your TV...throw away your paper...move to the country and build you a home. Plant a little garden...eat a lot of peaches...try and find Jesus on your own.

Bewildered, bewildered, you have no complaint. You are what you are, and you ain't what you ain't.

I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song.

Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down... and won.

MAKE ME AN ANGEL THAT FLIES FROM MONTGOMERY, MAKE ME A POSTER OF AN OLD RODEO JUST GIVE ME ONE THING THAT I CAN HOLD ON TO TO BELIEVE IN THIS LIVIN' IS JUST A HARD WAY TO GO.

I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better; the more they become part of the song, and they fill in the blanks. Rather than tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. Like what color the ashtray is. How far away the doorway was. So when you're talking about intangible things like emotions, the listener can fill in the blanks and you just draw the foundation.

I guess if you keep making the same mistake long enough, it becomes your style.

Writing is about a blank piece of paper and leaving out what’s not supposed to be there.

The scientific nature of the ordinary man is to go out and do the best you can.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in. The beginning makes no sense whatsoever. It just, like, rhymes. And then all of a sudden I'll go into, I am an old woman named after my mother.

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was...I've never had any discipline whatsoever. I just wait on a song like I was waiting for lightning to strike. And eventually-usually sometime around 3 in the morning-I'll have a good idea. By the time the sun comes up, hopefully, I'll have a decent song.

I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a typewriter even to a computer. I don't like it. There's no noise on the computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist. I edit as I am committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me and I go, "Yeah, that's it." They appear before me and they fit. I don't usually take large parts out. If I get stuck early in a song, I take it as a sign that I might be writing the chorus and don't know it. Sometimes,you gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you're doing.