Bruce Springsteen Quotes

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 different social forces that affected my parents' lives or my friends' lives or I saw around me became essential for me to write about.

My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.

You know, my music utilizes things from the past, because that's what the past is for. It's to learn from. It's not to limit you, you shouldn't be limited by it.

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.

Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music.

The school system only recognizes one type of intelligence. There are so many different types of intelligence.

The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.

I think when you're a child, you just cling to the basics, which is the basic story of Jesus and the crucifixion and hell and eternal punishment and the flames. This was all stuff that was - forget when you're young.

The life of a rock & roll band will last as long as you can look down into the audience and see yourself.

Show a little faith, there's magic in the night.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

I always felt that the musician's job was to provide an alternative source of information.

I know your mama she don't like me, cause I play in a rock and roll band.

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.

All people have is hope. That's what brings the next day and whatever that day may bring... A hope grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family...

The first day I can remember looking into a mirror and being able to stand what I saw was the day I had a guitar in my hand.

I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in.

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

There's people that get a chance to do the kind of work that changes the world, and make things really different. And there's the kind that just keeps the world from falling apart.

I tend to be pessimistic. I want to believe in hope.

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul.

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.

I'm used to writing something, it becomes a record, it comes out. Then I go perform and I play it and I get this immediate feedback from the audience. So that's been the pattern of my life.

I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the 'better angels' of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.

cause down the shore everything's all right

Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.

You know hearts these days are cheap.

Together, we'll live with the sadness. I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.

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

Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

When I look at myself, I don't see the man I wanted to be.

Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.

I never knew anybody who was unhappy with their job and was happy with their life. It's your sense of purpose. Now, some people can find it elsewhere. Some people can work a job and find it some place else.

Patti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.

It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.

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.

Sister, I won't ask for forgiveness, my sins are all I have.

More than rich, more than famous, more than happy...I wanted to be great.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

Every fool has a reason for feeling sorry for himself.

Let's raise our glass and let the hammer fly, yeah, this is the long good-bye.

We've got no fairytale ending, in God's hands our fate is complete. Your heaven's here in my heart, our love's this dust beneath my feet.

Because we lived in the presence of the church and the convent and the rectory and the school 24-7. And this was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers.

You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past.

Most of the artists I know are crazy in one way or another. I think that's why you get into it. You're in pursuit of a certain sort of peace that's very, very, very difficult to come by.

Well now I'm no hero, that's understood. All the redemption I can offer girl, is beneath this dirty hood. With a chance to make it good somehow, hey what else can we do now? Except roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair. Well the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere. We got one last chance to make it real.

Deindustrialization that I have written about for 40 years left a good part of the American public behind.