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.”

“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.”

“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 like doing chores.”

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

“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'd rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.”

“When I'm writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.”

“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.”

“If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.”

“I did three club tours before I started playing concert halls, and the clubs were half full the first time around.”

“I always feel like every song is the last song.”

“I just like a good, sad song. The sadder, the better. It moves me.”

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

“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.”

“Johnny Cash was like Abraham Lincoln to me.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”