Quotes from 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.

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'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.

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.'

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.'

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

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 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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes a steering wheel is better than a guitar

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

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.

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

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

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.

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