Quotes from Kris Kristofferson

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.'

I don't think I'm that good a singer. I can't think of a song that I've written that I don't like the way somebody else sings it better.

'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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

I ended up being friends with all my heroes. Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Johnny Cash - it was incredible.

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.'

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 have no neighbors. I live in a small town where everybody is very protective of me.

I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters.

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

I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.

When I was stationed in Germany, Johnny Cash was already a legend over there because he'd done some shows, then gone off to some bar straight afterwards and played just for the troops. So he was a real hero.

There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.

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

I gave everything I ever wrote to Johnny Cash. I think he said later in some interview that he would take them home and throw them in the lake with all the other demos. I'm sure he got a million of them.

'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.

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.

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.