Bruce Springsteen Quotes

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

I think that it's a natural thing for parents to look for reflections of themselves in their children and feel a certain pride there. So if your child is very, very different, or perhaps if he's very, very similar, it makes you uncomfortable.

Most artists I know had one person in their life who told them they were the second coming of the baby Jesus, and another person that told them they weren't worth anything, and they believed them both, you know?

A man armed with a rhyming dictionary is a dangerous man.

I think 1960s small-town America was very Lynchian. Everything was there, but underneath, everything was rumbling.

Unions have been the only powerful and effective voice working people have ever had in the history of this country.

What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.

I heard a political message in rock music. A liberation message. A message of freedom. I heard it in Elvis' voice.

Your legs were heaven, your breasts were the alter, your body was the holy land.

Go-kart Mozart was checking out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside.

I took a month long vacation in the stratosphere, and you know it's very hard to hold your breath.

What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?

When you have three teenagers, it gives a whole new meaning to "homeland security."

The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

If you're good, you're always looking over your shoulder.

A dream of life comes to me, like a catfish dancing on the end of the line.

I wanted to be the reasonable voice of revenge for what I'd seen [my father] life come to.

"Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song.

T-Bone Burnett once said that much of rock music is simply someone going wahhh daddy.

I got Mary pregnant and man that's all she wrote. And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a factory coat.

It's time to impeach the president and get a man in there to get us out of this mess.

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.

My dad was young. He went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. That didn't seem to be in the nature of - in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really. They were - we had a cousin that went to - off to Brown University. It was like a nuclear explosion took place.

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.

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.

Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair. The night's busted open. These two lanes will take us anywhere.

I think politics come out of psychology.

In a restless heart the seed of betrayal lay.

For me, once I count the band in, and I delve deep into my song, I feel a certain sort of integrity and integration that I rarely find in my daily life.

The Clash were a major influence on my own music. They were the best rock 'n' roll band. Thanks, Joe.

So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes, is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

[People] are trying to - they're trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems inside of them or in their history. And I think when I unknowingly - when I went to do that, that's what I was - I was trying to integrate all of these very difficult things that I'd been unable to integrate in my life and in my life with my parents.

They say "ya gotta stay hungry"... Hey Baby...I'm just about starvin' tonight!

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong To Cowardly Lion:"As for you my fine friend, you are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom.Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz "Courage faces fear and thereby masters it."Martin Luther King, Jr. "These days I'm feeling all right'cept I can't tell my courage from my desperation

At the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe.

Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little by little, piece by piece.

I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.

For the ones who had a notion, A notion deep inside, That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

When you`re onstage you have a certain faith that somebody's gonna yell somethin' back. Some nights it's louder than other nights and some nights they do, and on some songs they don't. But that's the idea. I think when you begin to expect a reaction from an audience, it's a mistake.

Two hearts are better than one.

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

Baby, this town rips the bones from our back it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We got to get out while we're young.

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.

The moment you begin to depend on audience reaction, you're doing the wrong thing. You're doin' it wrong, it's a mistake, it's not right. You can't allow yourself, no matter what, to depend on them.

I don't want to make a record like in the '50s or the '60s or the '70s. I want to make a record like today, that`s right now.

It's hard to be a saint in the city.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.