Steve Earle Quotes

I'm not going to waste a second feeling sorry for myself because I'm not a bigger star than I am. I can walk down the street in most places in the world and I still drive really nice cars.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

My gift's primarily literary. That being said, I ended up a musician. By the time I made the bluegrass record...I'm more impressed with myself when I push the envelope musically than I am when I push it literality.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion, too.

I'll never believe that Americans have racticed in our history anything close to the purest form of democracy of the world. Because there are lots of democracies around the world that function better than ours does. It's always been that way. There's some truth to the idea that it's rigged, but there is a way that it's supposed to work that.

What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

My audience doesn't agree with me on everything, but I love my audience, because they're totally okay with us having a dialogue.

Every day on Earth is another chance to get it right.

I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist, just by selling 100,000 records. I don't sell millions of records, and I don't need to.

I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore.

I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, trying to compare how many records I've sold or how much money I've made.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.

Records are only one-dimensional. Even film is only one-dimensional. That's why music and live theatre is so important, because it's not the same thing. A recording is just a record of part of the experience, but it's not the whole experience.

When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.

I love baseball. I'll probably end up one of those old farts who go to spring training in Florida every year and drive from game to game all day.