He drank his first strong liquor then to calm his shaking hand, and tried to tell himself at last he had become a man.

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.

I've never been accused of a felony. I never spent time behind bars except for a few overnight jail times back in the Sixties. [But] I think there's a little bit of a criminal in all of us. Everybody's done something they don't want anybody to know about.

There's unconditional love there. You hear that phrase a lot but it's real with me and her [June Carter]. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She's always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody's gone home and the lights are turned off, it's just me and her.

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.

Until things are brighter.. I'm the man in black.

The hardest thing for me in Vietnam wasn't seeing the wounded and dead. It was watching the big transport jets come in, bringing loads of fresh new boys for the war.