Bruce Springsteen Quotes

...It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

Nothing matters in the whole wide world when you're in love with a Jersey girl.

The light from the oncoming train focuses the mind.

Fame, on its best day, is kind of like a friendly wave from a stranger by the side of the road. And when it's not so good, it's like a long walk home, all alone, with nobody in when you get there.

You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

You can beat the drum so hard that people stop listening. I wanted to use my voice wisely and not expend it wastefully.

There's a girl across the bar, I get the message she's sending. Mmm, she ain't looking too married, and me, well, I'm pretending.

The one thing I wished for my children is that they'd be readers.

I want a thousand guitars . . .

Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience.

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

I was real good at music and real bad at everything else.

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty. And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...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...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...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

It doesn't matter what happened last night or the night - or tomorrow night. It's all about what you're doing with this audience right now.

I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate.

On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience.

Use it, Rosie, that's what it's there for.

Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique.

When I was young I was very shy and that was my personality. I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety.

I tend to be not my own best company. I can get a little lost when - if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me.

We're gonna play some pool, skip some school, act real cool, stay out all night, it's gonna be alright.

Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind I'm ready to grow young again

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.

I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done.

I go to put my arm around you and you give me a look like I'm way out of bounds.

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

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

Somehow all you ever need's never really quite enough.

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.

When I was young, it was sort of built to intimidate. Even on this very local level in this very small church in this small town, it still held that sort of - held you in the palm of its darkness.

I'm laughing at you, you're laughing at me.

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.

Is there anybody alive out there?

The release date is just one day, but the record is forever.

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.

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.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

I'm interested in what it means to be an American. 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 always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in.

An outgrowth of having a long career is that I have a lot of interesting things around that I get to revisit, and someday get to the place where they become something that I want to do next.

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.

I know I ain't nobody's bargain, but hell a little touchup and a little paint.

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.