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.
Bruce Springsteen

Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.
Bruce Springsteen

But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.
Bruce Springsteen

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.
Bruce Springsteen

Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music.
Bruce Springsteen

From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life.
Bruce Springsteen

I always wanted my music to influence the life you were living emotionally - with your family, your lover, your wife, and, at a certain point, with your children.
Bruce Springsteen

I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.
Bruce Springsteen

I didn't know if it would be a success-ful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter.
Bruce Springsteen

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. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.
Bruce Springsteen


I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.
Bruce Springsteen

I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off, so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly.
Bruce Springsteen

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
Bruce Springsteen

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.
Bruce Springsteen

I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.
Bruce Springsteen

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.
Bruce Springsteen

I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.
Bruce Springsteen

If they had told me I was the janitor and would have to mop up and clean the toilets after the show in order to play, I probably would have done it.
Bruce Springsteen

In America everything's about who's number one today.
Bruce Springsteen

In the early years, I found a voice that was my voice and also partly my father's voice. But isn't that what you always do? Why do kids at 5 years old go into the closet and put their daddy's shoes on? Hey, my kids do it.
Bruce Springsteen