Bruce Springsteen Quotes

“A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.”

“Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.”

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

“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.”

“Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.”

“But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.”

“Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music.”

“Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.”

“Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.”

“For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.”

“For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn't do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn't fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.”

“Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.”

“I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.”

“I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination.”

“I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.”

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

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

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

“I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.”

“I think politics come out of psychology.”

“I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.”

“I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up – either religious or social laws – become meaningless.”

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

“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.”

“I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music.”

“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 got the chutzpa or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good about it, it's going to make a difference.”

“If they had told me I was the janitor and would have to mop up and clean the toilets after the show in order to play, I probably would have done it.”

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

“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.”

“It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.”