Why we love Willie Nelson, reason #245

'I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes,' Nelson said with a smile, sitting in a luxury suite at New York's Carlyle Hotel, a whiff of marijuana drifting down the corridor.

Nelson admits he's had a few run-ins with the law over his pot smoking habits. 'If you're going to be out there with it, somebody's going to pull you over, just because they can. ... I talk about it a lot, but I'm not going to walk into some police station burning one down and say, 'How are you all doing?'

He says the pot smoking hasn't hindered his songwriting. On the contrary, it may have helped filter out the duds.

'I figured if it wasn't worth remembering it probably wasn't a very good song, so that would be the test, to see if I remembered it until I got back to a guitar or a piano,' he said. 'That was usually a pretty good measuring stick, but I'm sure I forgot a few that might have been OK.'

Nelson spreads "The Tao of Willie" - Yahoo! News