Quotes By John Prine

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.

I think the best duets are those where there's a dialogue back and forth, and then the two singers go into a thing together.

Even when I was coming up in the singer-songwriter ranks during the early '70s, I thought that people who were stylists and stuff shoulda still been up on the pedestal. I mean, it's fine to recognize people who write songs, but it kinda got out of hand, you know?

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.

The Songwriters Hall of fame, that's the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.

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.

Man, it was a great place then. I love going back to Chicago. Man, it was a good amount of fortune. That Steve and I came along when we did, and got into the Chicago folk scene. It was kind of all ready for us.

I really started writing when I got out of the army in 1968. And went back to the post office - I had done a couple of years in there before I got drafted. So I went back there to work.

Especially when you've got your own mail route, day after day, it was an easy place to write. It was like going to a library with no books. You're afforded to just go do your job, and you don't really even have to think about it. You know you're on the right street and you're at the right house, and you're putting the mail in the right box. That's where I wrote a lot of the early songs, walking on the mail route.

People would always tell me about minor chords - when you're writing a song, to put a minor chord in. For me, it's like doom, you know. You know somebody's gonna be extremely sick or die if there's a character in the song.

When I was writing the song, I thought that these people have entire lives in there. They're not writers, but they all have stories to tell. Some are very, very down deeper than others.

I knew Fred since I was 14 and was first going to the Old Town School, Fred used to work part-time in the store. Every time I wrote a song Fred would turn on his really good high-class tape recorder, reel-to-reel, and record it. So he's got recordings of me on guitar singing all my songs in his apartment long before I ever recorded for a recording company. I never found out what happened to the tapes.

I find humor in just about every situation. Even the most serious situations. And I find if you use it right, it allows the listener not to feel so uncomfortable. Or to even empathize with that character.

From a broken relationship I was in. I could not understand what went wrong and I had to explain to myself, and I did it through this song. The next day I thought, Jesus, that's beautiful. I didn't recognize it at the time, it was just pouring out of me.

The kind of thing where kids in class would stand up and say they were Irish-German or Scandinavian or whatever. My dad, after he had a couple beers, said, "Remember, son: you're pure Kentuckian, the last of a dyin' breed.

We were all sure we were getting sent over there. Everybody got their orders and I'd say 85 percent of the guys went to Vietnam. When I got the orders for Germany, my father was really happy.

If there had been a tornado or something that took the town, it would've been the same song.

If you're out there day after day, going around playing the same places, you pretty much think you've reached your audience. But there's more people finding my music every day.

Even when I was a mailman. That job required no great skill, so once you got it down, you had a lot of free time to daydream and make up songs.

On the best day, there's no context for the moment. Often, the best writing and pieces have been lost to not having been digitized.