The only reason I figured out I didn't like my old records to listen was I could hear how nervous I was and how uncomfortable I was. And who would want to sit around and listen to yourself being uncomfortable?

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.

Never wear your necktie while you're operating a lathe.

When you're singing somebody else's songs, it's just pure joy to me.

After a couple bouts with cancer and everything, black cats are nothin', you know?

I'd rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.

My first Grammy nomination? I was 24 - I was nominated for best new artist of the year.

To tell you the truth, the nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame totally surprised me. I had no idea that was coming. I know a lot of people like to say it's enough just to be nominated. But I've been nominated for so many things, I'd like to get this one. I think it's a long shot, considering I never had a No. 1 rock n' roll record.

People thought we were crazy for starting a record company. They really thought I was shooting myself in the foot.

'The Ways of a Woman in Love' is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl's house and wishing he was the one in her arms.

The only time I ever think about getting old is when I look in the mirror. I feel pretty good about it, actually.

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.

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.

You know that first love that leaves you? You never forget that, especially if you're a songwriter. I must have gotten nine songs out of that girl.

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.

Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman were the two most unselfish people I ever met.

I could never teach a class on songwriting. I'd tell them to goof off and find a good hideout.

As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.

I always feel like every song is the last song.

I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.

I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it's real before I put it down on paper.

I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.

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.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.

I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.

Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.

I can blame a lot of things for not writing songs, but cancer isn't one of them.

If you listen to people talk, when people actually talk, they talk in melodies. If they get angry, their voice rises, and it's more of a staccato thing. When they ask for something, they're real sweet. It's all music.

I'm not good at remembering things, in general.

When I was a mailman, writing songs was my escape from the regular world, and now writing songs is my job. And I've always been one to avoid my job.

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.

In the Army, I was very good at avoiding my job!

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.

Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.

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.

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?

You get to thinking that because you've written 50 or 100 songs, you think maybe you know how to do it. But when they're not coming along, you're just as in the dark as you ever were. When they're coming along, there's nothing to it. Sometimes it's so easy, it's like you're a court stenographer.

I think it shows when you have to work too hard on a song.

I don't concern myself with where I fit in. I just keep my head down and keep doing whatever it is I'm going.

I never fit in with straight country. I never really fit in with rock n' roll. I've always been somewhere in between all this stuff.

I don't like to see Christmas trees torn down.

If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.

When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.

There's only two things. There's life, and there's death.

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.

I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you're not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you.

I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people's songs.

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.

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.

I was kind of shy as a lad, and a lot of things that made me laugh, I found, did not make other people laugh.