John Prine Quotes

Well, I just can't play the game anymore. I'm 63 years old, and I've been in the business for 40 years now. I take good advice and direction really well, but I don't need somebody that finished college two years ago to come in and tell me what I should be recording.

I've finally become an old guy.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

It's a good giggle to look back at yourself in your 20s. You thought you were so fierce and fabulous, and it's just embarrassing.

I am conscious each time I ask a question that there is a deep resentment in the heart of the railroad official at being compelled to answer; but that he is compelled to, he recognizes.

It was the allurement of these fiscal advantages undoubtedly that prolonged the illusion and concealed the immense injury they did to industry and their infraction of natural right. This illusion had extended so far that some persons asserted that the right to work was a royal privilege which the king might sell, and that his subjects were bound to purchase from him. We hasten to correct this error and to repel the conclusion. God in giving to man wants and desires rendering labor necessary for their satisfaction, conferred the right to labor upon all men, and this property is the first, most sacred, and imprescriptible of all.... The King [Louis XVI] regards it as the first duty of his justice, and the worthiest act of benevolence, to free his subjects from any restriction upon this inalienable right of humanity.

My speaking is irregular. Sometimes quite good, sometimes not, but generally will do.... I am too far along in experience and years both for this business. I do not go into [it] with the zest of old times. Races, baseball, and politics are for the youngsters.

This is what happens when you get old and have a couple of bucks. You go back and try to be young again.

Congress is too old. They don't have a stake in the game.

While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience, you cannot confer it.

'Bloody do-gooders' is my expression for people who are nicer than me, who are better than me.

I've never really been a rebellious teen.

The only thing that makes me feel old is when I can see your ankles and you have on pants.

You have to listen to the people who employ you.

You can have old guys who aren't willing to be coached just like you can have young guys who aren't willing to be coached.

My car had broken down, and a neighbor of mine, this old guy, helped me change a tire. We just had a superdope, thoughtful conversation. And I realized, yo, this is rare. Like, this needs to happen more often.

I'll flip a stupid tire. But I ain't running.

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.

I was raised to please people in authority, and I'd also come from a sheltered boarding school, so I was very naive and young for my years.

I know I'm not smarter than a 10-year-old.

You know how it is: you're a kid, and you see your parents do something, you tend not to want to follow that and do your own thing.

You know you're getting older when the record executives start getting younger.

Probably the only thing that I really don't like about being an old guy is so many of the people who understand what we know are gone.

I came away with the idea that respect is really the solution. We need to teach young people to respect authority - particularly, respect the law.

Nobody can tell me what I can or can't do, except they can.