He not busy being born is busy dying.

I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison’s voice came...

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

I cannot rhyme or play guitar, piano and am not very much interested in doing any of these.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.

I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness...

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that’s going on...

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift – look out out kid, they keep it all hid

Ah, but I was so much older thenI’m younger than that now

I say there’re no depressed words just depressed minds.

Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Look out, kid, it’s sumpin’ ya did, God knows when, but you’re doin’ it again

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

Johnny was and is the North Star. You could guide your ship by him.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change.

I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.

The beginning was there in Minnesota. But that was the beginning before the beginning. I don’t know how I come to songs. I just go ahead and do it. I’m just sort of trying to...

Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you’d like to act.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

[The plot of] Always … Patsy Cline … Bessie Smith.

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to...

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

You’ve got a lot of nerve, To say you are my friend, When I was down, you just stood there grinning

You’re gonna have to serve somebody.

For them that think death’s honesty won’t fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.