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"  You don&amp;#039;t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.  Never give up, which is the lesson I learned from boxing. As soon as you learn to never give up, you have to learn the power and wisdom of unconditional surrender, and that one doesn&amp;#039;t cancel out the other; they just exist as contradictions. The wisdom of it comes as you get older.  If you can&amp;#039;t get out of something, get into it. If you can&amp;#039;t fix it, fuck it.   Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. &amp;#039;Cause that&amp;#039;s all that matters in the end.   There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.   If God made anything better than women, I think he kept it for himself.   I believe in the herb, and if it were up to me, it would be legalized.   The number-one rule of the road is never go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself. You will break this rule, and you will be sorry.   I&amp;#039;ve been trying to think of things to tell my kids, something that I could pass down, and it&amp;#039;s like, gee whiz, I maybe never learned anything that didn&amp;#039;t contradict itself.   The closest I&amp;#039;ve come to knowing myself is in losing myself. That&amp;#039;s why I loved football before I loved music. I could lose myself in it. Music and drugs and rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll -- all of it is for you to lose yourself.   Kissinger had his reasons.  The older I get, the less conservative I become.   Dennis Hopper playing golf is one of the first signs of the apocalypse. It&amp;#039;s true -- he&amp;#039;s become a Republican.  It&amp;#039;s hard to turn away when you feel like you are getting paid more than you deserve.  When I was thirty and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it&amp;#039;s just the opposite.   The one thing I regret is missing the time with my older children when they were young. I think of it when I&amp;#039;m carrying my little four-year-old around. We&amp;#039;d already split up by the time my son was born, and I rarely got to hold him, but, fortunately, we are very close now. In fact, if I had to live with one person on an island, I&amp;#039;d probably live with him, &amp;#039;cause he&amp;#039;s the funniest son of a bitch I know. I was a slow starter. I mean, I grew up in the fifties, and, jeez, I wasn&amp;#039;t even laid in high school. Looking back on it, I didn&amp;#039;t know anything, which was kind of unfortunate for my first couple of wives. When I found out that girls like sex as much as guys, I was, for many years, feeling like that was my function. I mean, I wasn&amp;#039;t as bad as Clinton, but I was led by the pecker.  I&amp;#039;m sure you slow down a little bit, but I&amp;#039;m also sure that you&amp;#039;ll probably be getting a hard-on until they throw dirt on you.  Being in love with a lot of people is incompatible with a stable family life.   The desire to be fucked-up probably leaves you, but the desire to be high never does.   I&amp;#039;ve tried to be more self-sufficient as I&amp;#039;ve gotten older. I&amp;#039;d like to not worry about whether they&amp;#039;re going to sell my next album or book. Hell, William Blake wasn&amp;#039;t even published in his lifetime.   When was the last time you looked at the stars with the wonder they deserve? That they&amp;#039;re out there is totally a mystery.   Freedom is just another word: It seems to get truer the older I get. It makes me think about the time when my apartment got robbed and everything was gone and I was disowned by my family. I owed money to a hospital and I owed my wife five hundred a month for child support and I thought, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m losing my job.&amp;quot; I hadn&amp;#039;t any money, I hadn&amp;#039;t anything going for me, but it was liberating. I was in this Evangeline Motel, like something out of Psycho, a filthy place, just sitting there with this neon Jesus outside the door, in the swamps outside of Lafayette, Louisiana, and I thought, &amp;quot;Fuck. I&amp;#039;m on the bottom, can&amp;#039;t go any lower&amp;quot; -- and from then on, man, I drove my car to the airport, left it there, and never went back to get it. Went to Nashville and called this friend of mine, Mickey Newberry, and told him I&amp;#039;d just got fired, and he said, &amp;quot;Great. Johnny Cash is shooting a new TV show. Come up, and we can pitch him some songs.&amp;quot; The next moment, they cut three of my songs, and they were hits. I never had to go back to work again. Originally published in the May 1999 issue "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1283/learned-kris-kristofferson-0599/>