Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Kris Kristofferson

By not having to live up to people's expectations, I was somehow free.

I feel so lucky to have lived the life that I did and to be surrounded by the people I love. I've got eight kids, and they're always laughing all the time. It's like music to my ears. I think that my frame of mind these days is probably happier than I've ever been, which is kind of odd, coming close to the finish line.

There was a film that really affected me, 'La Strada' by Fellini, where Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina travel around on his little motorcycle thing.

I boxed in Golden Gloves at Oxford and still know how to throw a straight left jab.

I got scars on my face that tell some kind of story. I'm looking in the mirror, and I got one scar that's really two scars - half from a baseball bat and half from playing football in college. I'll tell you, though, after a while, your face gets so wrinkled up you can hardly see them.

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

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

You don't paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.

I've had a life of all kinds of experiences - most of them good. And I've got eight kids and a wife that puts up with everything I do and keeps me out of trouble.

I've been writing songs since I was a little boy. You know, I think I wrote my first song when I was 11.

The older I get, the less conservative I become.

'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.

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.'

To me, if you love it enough to devote your life to it, then you're doing the right thing.

I never thought of acting as a creative process. Christ, I used to go to the movies and see Brando talking like he was trying to sell shoes, and he was great. I thought anybody could do it. Then I tried it, and I got so uptight, I'm limited as to what I can do on film.

If you can't get out of something, get into it.

Those 'Idol' shows are kind of scary to me. They wanted me to be on one of those panels one time, and I said it's the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do. I would hate to have to discourage somebody.

I have no regrets. I feel very grateful for the life that I had - you know, family I live with; and I've been doing work that I love, ever since I came to Nashville.

I was never big or fast, but I got to play football and box.

There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.

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

Just the words and melody - that's what moves your emotions.

Human rights is something that wasn't hard to be inspired to write about because there have been so many violations of those rights.

Freedom is just another word: It seems to get truer the older I get.

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.

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

If it hadn't been for Johnny Cash, I'd probably have been a Nashville songwriter because that's what I had done for almost five years.

When I wrote 'Help Me Make It Through the Night,' I was on an oil platform out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and was just thinking of myself.

Johnny Cash's legacy, I think if it was one word, it would be 'integrity.' He was the original wild man and grew from that guy that was doing all the crazy things that you read that rock n' rollers do to being someone who was like the father of our country, you know. He was a guest at the White House. He was Billy Graham's friend.

To me, the best love songs work on two - maybe three - different levels, where you're talking about the person who you're right opposite, and all the people like that.

'Heaven's Gate' was based on a true story about the cattle people: the people who had the money turned on the settlers who were in the area. And it was mainly a defense of their behavior. And the cattlemen's association had just about declared war on these people who were poaching cattle, and because they were mainly immigrants.

Being in love with a lot of people is incompatible with a stable family life.

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.

'This Old Road' somehow seems to get better the older you get.

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

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

My old man worked for Pan American.

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

It's always embarrassing when somebody does something praiseworthy of you.

The great thing about Nashville back in the day was that the old guys hung out where the young guys were. The established writers like Harlan Howard and Jack Clement gave us encouragement and passed the guitar, you know? Chet Atkins let me sit in on his sessions. Everybody was good to us, and everybody loved the music.

I really have no anxiety about controlling my own life.

I hope that I'll keep being creative until they throw dirt on me.

Never give up, which is the lesson I learned from boxing. As soon as you learn to never give up, you have to learn the power and wisdom of unconditional surrender, and that one doesn't cancel out the other; they just exist as contradictions. The wisdom of it comes as you get older.

Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end.

Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free.

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 think I'm a much better father as an older man than I was with my first kids. Occasionally, I have to yell at the little guys, but they don't take me seriously. 'Listen to the old guy,' they say. 'Isn't he great? He's mad.'

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.

Everything that I write is sort of autobiographical, and I don't know that I'm getting better, but I'm certainly running out of time.

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.

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 was working the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs, flying helicopters. I'd lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it.

Johnny Cash has always been larger than life.

I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

The closest I've come to knowing myself is in losing myself. That's why I loved football before I loved music. I could lose myself in it.

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.

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.

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