“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.”
― John Prine
“I take my own syrup, ketchup, and mustard, just in case of emergencies, in my suitcase. Whatever I can steal from the hotels. It’s usually Heinz ketchup, and they give you a weird mustard. You don’t get French’s or anything; you get some sort of Dijon or some mustard. That’s just for hot dogs. I don’t use mustard for anything else.”
― John Prine
“I could never teach a class on songwriting. I’d tell them to goof off and find a good hideout.”
― John Prine
“People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.”
― John Prine
“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.’”
― John Prine
“My sense of humor has saved me more than a couple of times in my life.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“The only time I ever think about getting old is when I look in the mirror. I feel pretty good about it, actually.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Some voices don’t blend. They just kinda rub against each other.”
― John Prine
“I’d rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.”
― John Prine
“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.’”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that’s pretty good.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“After a couple bouts with cancer and everything, black cats are nothin’, you know?”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“When I’m writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.”
― John Prine
“I like doing chores.”
― John Prine
“I did three club tours before I started playing concert halls, and the clubs were half full the first time around.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Never wear your necktie while you’re operating a lathe.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I always feel like every song is the last song.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I think it shows when you have to work too hard on a song.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.”
― John Prine
“The more producers I talked to, the more I got looked at like I was crazy for wanting to make a live-sounding album.”
― John Prine
“In high school, I was a poor student.”
― John Prine
“’Sam Stone’ is a song about futility.”
― John Prine
“When I was a boy, my family used to watch a lot of Laurel and Hardy.”
― John Prine
“I don’t like to be caught without a pick.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“If somebody tells me to work or exercise, I go the other way. I’ll come up with an excuse.”
― John Prine
“Yeah, early ’71 is when I got my record contract. I had a record come out by August of ’71. Things happened really fast.”
― John Prine
“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?”
― John Prine
“I sound like that old guy down the street that doesn’t chase you out of his apple tree.”
― John Prine
“I think I’ve finally, after 72 years, gotten used to my voice, and it sounds like a friend now instead of an enemy.”
― John Prine
“The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.”
― John Prine
“When you’re singing somebody else’s songs, it’s just pure joy to me.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I had a year-round Christmas tree with nothing but colored vinyl 45s hanging on it, like, old Elvis records and stuff.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Man, I hated school. I’d stare at the buttons on the teacher’s shirt the whole class.”
― John Prine
“My fans have always taken care of me.”
― John Prine
“I just like a good, sad song. The sadder, the better. It moves me.”
― John Prine
“I have to have something that really excites me in order to write about it.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Johnny Cash was like Abraham Lincoln to me.”
― John Prine
“I still enjoy the heck out of getting up there to play shows every night.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Ignorance is bliss as a writer, I think.”
― John Prine
“After cancer, I ain’t scared of nothing.”
― John Prine
“There’s nothing I hate more than canceling shows.”
― John Prine
“For me, there’s nothing like performing.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.”
― John Prine
“My first Grammy nomination? I was 24 – I was nominated for best new artist of the year.”
― John Prine
“People thought we were crazy for starting a record company. They really thought I was shooting myself in the foot.”
― John Prine
“’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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman were the two most unselfish people I ever met.”
― John Prine
“I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.”
― John Prine
“I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it’s real before I put it down on paper.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.”
― John Prine
“I can blame a lot of things for not writing songs, but cancer isn’t one of them.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I’m not good at remembering things, in general.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“In the Army, I was very good at avoiding my job!”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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?”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I don’t like to see Christmas trees torn down.”
― John Prine
“If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.”
― John Prine
“When I’m making my own record, it’s real work for me.”
― John Prine
“There’s only two things. There’s life, and there’s death.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people’s songs.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“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.”
― John Prine
“I was kind of shy as a lad, and a lot of things that made me laugh, I found, did not make other people laugh.”
― John Prine
“I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.”
― John Prine
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