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.
Bruce Springsteen
It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
Bruce Springsteen
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
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
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.
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
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.
Bruce Springsteen
Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
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
There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.
Bruce Springsteen
In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous.
Bruce Springsteen
I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.
Bruce Springsteen
The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound, and without that guy making that sound, you don't have a band, you know.
Bruce Springsteen
The star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.
Bruce Springsteen
I looked at myself, and I just said, 'Well, you know, I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.' So I said, 'Well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.'
Bruce Springsteen
I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.
Bruce Springsteen
There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.
Bruce Springsteen
All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records, but if you were a kid, you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.
Bruce Springsteen
Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.
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.
Bruce Springsteen
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
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 played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
Bruce Springsteen
While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.
Bruce Springsteen
'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.
Bruce Springsteen
If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know.
Bruce Springsteen
My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.
Bruce Springsteen
I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
Bruce Springsteen
I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is. I got the chutzpa or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good about it, it's going to make a difference.
Bruce Springsteen
