John Prine Quotes

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

Because death and illness are the most horrible things in life, of course that's where the most absurdly funny things are going to happen.

Well, life is dark, isn't it? Mostly, it's dreadful. At the same time, death is funny too. I mean, look at the fuss we make of it.

The world is an infinitely fascinating, tragic and humorous place.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

I'm totally human.

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

Life deserves laughter, hence people laugh at it.

It's a funny old world.

I know all human beings will be successful. How do I know? They all die.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest - things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know.

My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

In order to satirize adequately, I think you need to bring people down to Earth and be like, 'Yeah, these people drink coffee and have tummy troubles and they go to the bathroom like anybody else, and they all have relationship problems, if they even have relationships.'

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.