Johnny Cash Quotes - Page 6

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

I'm thankful for the sea breeze that feels so good right now, and the scent of jasmine when the sun starts going down.

Convicts are the best audience I ever played for.

Gospel music is so ingrained into my bones. I can't do a concert without singing a gospel song. It's what I was raised on.

However, neither he nor anyone else could have become the star Elvis was. Ain't nobody like Elvis. Never was.

So I simply don't buy the concept of "Generation X" as the "lost generation." I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing, just as Jack was. Their distractions are greater, though. There's no more simple life with simple choices for the young.

We went down [Folsom Prison] and there's a rodeo at all these shows that the prisoners have there. And in between the rodeo things, they asked me to set up and do two or three songs. So that was what I did. I did "Folsom Prison Blues," which they thought was their song - you know? - and "I Walk The Line," "Hey Porter," "Cry, Cry, Cry." And then the word got around on the grapevine that Johnny Cash is all right and that you ought to see him.

My daddy left home when I was three and he didn't leave much to Ma and me, just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.

That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.

You know, the man's best friend is his dog... if he's got nothing else.

[Sam Phillips] laughed at me. I just didn't like the way I Walk The Line sounded to me. I didn't know I sounded that way. And I didn't like it. I don't know. But he said let's give it a chance, and it was just a few days until - that's all it took to take off.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

I kept talking to my producers at Columbia about recording one of those [prison] shows. So we went into Folsom on February 11, 1968, and recorded a show live.

This business I'm in is different. It's special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we're that close; somehow there's been an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other's triumphs, and when one of us gets hurt, we all bleed - it's corny, I know, but it's true. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's great. It turns up the heat in life.

I got really excited about it. But then we went into the studio and tried to record some with different musicians, and it didn't sound good. It didn't work. So we put together the album [Unchained] with just a guitar and myself.

I could wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere.

I expect my life to end pretty soon. You know, I'm 71 years old. I have great faith, though. I have unshakable faith.

So we raise her up every morning, we take her down every night, we don't let her touch the ground and we fold her up right. On second thought, I do like to brag 'cause I'm mighty proud of the Ragged Old Flag.

San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell. May your walls fall and may I live to tell.

My father was a man of love. He always loved me to death. He worked hard in the fields, but my father never hit me. Never. I don't ever remember a really cross, unkind word from my father.

I was wearing black clothes almost from the beginning. I feel comfortable in black. I felt like black looked good onstage, that it was attractive, so I started wearing it all the time.

When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!

It's all fleeting. As fame is fleeting, so are all the trappings of fame fleeting. The money, the clothes, the furniture.

I like to sit on the front porch of an old cabin I built in the woods and just listen to the birds; I like to fish in the pond and I always throw the fish back.