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.”

“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.'”

“In high school, I was a poor student.”

“In the Army, I was very good at avoiding my job!”

“There's only two things. There's life, and there's death.”

“Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.”

“I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it's real before I put it down on paper.”

“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.”

“I could never teach a class on songwriting. I'd tell them to goof off and find a good hideout.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“My fans have always taken care of me.”

“I still enjoy the heck out of getting up there to play shows every night.”

“The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.”

“I had a year-round Christmas tree with nothing but colored vinyl 45s hanging on it, like, old Elvis records and stuff.”