Steve Earle Quotes

From the moment [Bob] Dylan arrived as a songwriter, he was [so] much better than everybody else around.

I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.

You can go out and find ways to make your own record and get it out there now. If you really want to, you can be heard. Keep things simple. Learn to go out and play solo. That's a really really good thing to learn, if you're a singer-songwriter. Don't be dependent on a band because you may not always be able to afford one.

I don't type fast. I type with three fingers - two on one hand, and I only get one going on the other. I think my thumb's in there, but I'm not sure. I may be no better than an orangutan when it comes to that.

People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.

My therapist says that I choose women that I couldn't possibly succeed in a relationship with because I really want to be alone. Which sounds complicated and convoluted to me, but I don't know. Maybe she's right. There's a part of me that wants that.

My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs.

I don't care what's happening in the mainstream of country music. I haven't in a long time.

I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.

San Antonio is like a military town. It's like literally - when I was growing up there, there were five Air Force bases, plus Fort Sam Houston. I was always sort of near the military.

I was comparatively late in understanding Bob Dylan's overwhelming importance as a songwriter. Everybody who does my job exists in the shadow of Bob Dylan. There are two categories: Dylan and everybody else. It's as simple as that. And it's going to be that way until he dies.

I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.

I'm constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I'm forced to.

I wish I was as sure about things as Bill Monroe was sure about things.

At home, I'm lucky if I can write three or four hours before the phone starts ringing and the kids want to go to soccer.

I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.

The revolution starts now.

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

I've been a serial husband, and I've done it badly every time.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

If I can get Me out of the way, I can do anything.

Bob Dylan is one of the very few people in the history of popular music who you can unquestionably apply that word [genius] to.

Having a child at 55... that's optimism.

I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.

If there is such a thing as a workaholic, I'm it, and that's what passes for leisure.

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.

I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view.

There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.

I can deal with conservatives in a democracy. With real conservatives, I don't agree with them, but I understand why they believe what they believe and I believe they're being honest with me about it.

My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.

Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.

I had everything I need to get me killed.

The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.

Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly.

I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.

To me, religion is an agreement between a group of people about what God is. Spirituality is a one-on-one relationship.

You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.

I ain't ever satisfied.

Bob Dylan emerged from nowhere, like an alien. And that was just the start.

He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.

I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.

I have a low tolerance for mediocrity in music and life. I'm into pain and joy and the in-between doesn't interest me.

Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

I don't get in vote in whether or how people remember me when I'm gone. It's really dangerous to sit around and worry about it too much, for me. It gets me way too in myself to worry about what people are going to think about me when I'm not around anymore.

I really believe that if I make records that are indispensable to my audience, they'll go out and spend money to buy them, even if they've already downloaded them. If they can afford it. If they can't, I'd rather they be able to download it than not get it at all.

The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.