character and just say, oh, I’ll fix it up later. I’ll patch him up. Of course that never hap- pens. You’ve got to capture it. Another thing I am convinced of is the first step toward being an artist of any kind is you have got to be mis- erable. You’ve got to find a way to make your- self miserable. It doesn’t always work, as with Robin Williams. I have no idea what hap- pened. I have my theories and you have yours, and Robin had his. But I do believe that you’ve got to be miserable or you’re never gonna create anything great.
You’ve got to be the tortured artist. Never been much of a problem for me. (Laughs) Nah, it comes pretty easy. That’s what hap- pened with Willie. He dealt with failure the first half of his life and then came the hard part - how do you deal with success? That was the bitch. You know Kirk Douglas said one time that he gave his children everything he could as they were growing up but the one thing he was unable to give them was the privilege of growing up poor. And it is a privi- lege. It’s a rags to riches story, the Willie Nel- son story. He’s not the only one, Johnny Cash, Sam Rayburn - there were so many of ‘em that grew up pickin’ cotton, and Willie was one of them. I was not. And I truly be- lieve that with Willie it was the rags that made the man, not the riches. He was ready for success after a lifetime of failure. And as Willie said, if you fail at it long enough, you become a legend.
(Laughs)Yeah. That’s what happened to me in Texas politics. The only ones who lost more elections than me are Abe Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
I want to talk about your books. Was it a conscious decision when you switched from music to writing full time?
Maybe I was always supposed to be a writer. Willie belongs to the Woody Guthrie school. He’s got thousands of songs he’s written. I’ve got about 40 or 50 songs. That’s it. That’s a different kind of songwriter, and I just stopped believing that it was going anywhere and I started writing the books. I took to that more easily, and I’m writing a new one now and I’m on page 184 and I’m writing like Oscar Wilde in prison with his hair on fire, 10 or 15 pages a day on a good day, maybe more. The book is called The Hard Boiled Com- puter, its a mystery novel. Another Kinky mystery, which, I havent written one in ten years. It’s a return of the detective, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, I think. A couple of people have already read what I’ve got and they agree. And I type it all on the manual typewriter. I’m like Billy Bob, I think we’re the last two people on the earth that don’t have a computer, no internet, Facebook, Twitter, none of that. Willie is very high tech. Bob Dylan is high tech. Willie’s probably Tweeting Ashton Kutcher as we speak. He says I should get e- mail and all that and that it’s crazy not to have it. He said it really puts you outside of the loop.
Let’s talk about pot. You are touring and trying to convince Texas of the merits of legalization. Your thoughts? Well, with Texas politics, Texas does the right thing after it tries everything else. You know, right now, the idea of having the finest cancer hospital in the world, M.D. Anderson in Houston, arguably, and no medicinal mari- juana program whatsoever is just patently ridiculous. It was a part of my campaign for Agriculture Commissioner, but that’s over now. I think for many, many reasons it’s the smartest move Texas could have made and now they’re not gonna do it. Texas could be the leader of the whole country. The children
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