Bruce Springsteen
There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.Collection: Morning
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.Collection: Music
There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.Collection: Patriotism
Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.Collection: Faith
But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.Collection: Movies
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.Collection: Faith
When it comes to luck, you make your own.Collection: Chance
The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.Collection: Experience
It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.Collection: Sad
I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination.Collection: Imagination
After 'Born to Run,' I had a reaction to my good fortune. With success, it felt like a lot of people who'd come before me lost some essential part of themselves. My greatest fear was that success was going to change or diminish that part of myself.Collection: Fear
For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn't do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn't fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.Collection: Intelligence
Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why.Collection: Music
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.Collection: Chance
You ask for your audience's investment in your music; you're in a relationship with them. And their relationship with the E Street Band is separate from whatever else I might do. I like the idea of us being something that people rely on.Collection: Relationship
Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.Collection: Time
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation.
If you're good, you're always looking over your shoulder.
Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield.
I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.
Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.
I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by.
You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.
The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually.
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.
I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate.
And whether you're drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.
This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.
The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.
Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music.
Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.
From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life.
I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.
I had tried to go to college, and I didn't really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus - I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.
You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.
I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
Basically, I was pretty ostracized in my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks- and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.
Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out... The other two aren't quite into that yet.