John Prine Quotes
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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.
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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.'
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I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.
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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.
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I'd rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I just like a good, sad song. The sadder, the better. It moves me.
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As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.
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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.
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Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I still enjoy the heck out of getting up there to play shows every night.
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The only time I ever think about getting old is when I look in the mirror. I feel pretty good about it, actually.
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If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Never wear your necktie while you're operating a lathe.
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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.