John Prine Quotes

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

There are no rules to writing a song.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

I've written songs on everything. Menus. Napkins. Little pieces of paper.

It's not just music. To me, it's songwriting more than anything. A lot of people say it's expression, but to me, it's more than that.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

I've always had good songs, it's the great songs that are difficult to find.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.