Steve Earle
People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.Collection: Thinking
Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.Collection: Stories
Records are only one-dimensional. Even film is only one-dimensional. That's why music and live theatre is so important, because it's not the same thing. A recording is just a record of part of the experience, but it's not the whole experience.Collection: Live Theatre
I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.Collection: Home
I'm trying to make records where people don't feel cheated. Nashville has been guilty of insulting the Country Music audience for years and years.Collection: Country
I really believe that if I make records that are indispensable to my audience, they'll go out and spend money to buy them, even if they've already downloaded them. If they can afford it. If they can't, I'd rather they be able to download it than not get it at all.Collection: Believe
What saves me from being a drug addict is sort of the opposite. It's me realizing that I don't really control anything.Collection: Opposites
Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political "Copperhead Road" is isn't listening very well.Collection: Political
I just had a child on purpose at age 56, I'm pretty f---ing optimistic.Collection: Children
I'm not going to waste a second feeling sorry for myself because I'm not a bigger star than I am. I can walk down the street in most places in the world and I still drive really nice cars.Collection: Stars
The revolution starts now.Collection: Struggle
I'll never believe that Americans have racticed in our history anything close to the purest form of democracy of the world. Because there are lots of democracies around the world that function better than ours does. It's always been that way. There's some truth to the idea that it's rigged, but there is a way that it's supposed to work that.Collection: Believe
I don't type fast. I type with three fingers - two on one hand, and I only get one going on the other. I think my thumb's in there, but I'm not sure. I may be no better than an orangutan when it comes to that.Collection: Thinking
Back then, the business depended on bohemians. ... They needed Kristofferson and Roger Miller ..It was the tail end of something...the last Tin Pan Alley. ...and we were the night shift! They gave us keys, because they knew the best songs weren't written in daylight.... We got our keys taken away several times...me and Guy Clark.Collection: Song
From the moment [Bob] Dylan arrived as a songwriter, he was [so] much better than everybody else around.Collection: Bob
I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.Collection: Believe
I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.Collection: People
I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view.Collection: Tired
You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.Collection: Art
I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.Collection: Girl
What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.Collection: Country
I'm not a Democrat; I'm something well to the left of a Democrat, but I'm just realistic about the system.Collection: Realistic
When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.Collection: Song
Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me.Collection: Hands
The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.Collection: Writing
My audience doesn't agree with me on everything, but I love my audience, because they're totally okay with us having a dialogue.Collection: Dialogue
He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.Collection: Teacher
I think the music business is changing. Artists that don't want to tour and just want to collect royalty checks and stay home are not going to be able to do that.Collection: Home
Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore.Collection: Music
I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.Collection: Years
By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.Collection: Song
I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, trying to compare how many records I've sold or how much money I've made.Collection: Sorry
Bob Dylan emerged from nowhere, like an alien. And that was just the start.Collection: Bob
I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.Collection: New York
I can deal with conservatives in a democracy. With real conservatives, I don't agree with them, but I understand why they believe what they believe and I believe they're being honest with me about it.Collection: Real
My gift's primarily literary. That being said, I ended up a musician. By the time I made the bluegrass record...I'm more impressed with myself when I push the envelope musically than I am when I push it literality.Collection: Musician
I’m used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.Collection: Stories