Quotes by Bruce Springsteen
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A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.

I believe when your children are born that you are reborn in some fashion.

Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man, and i believe in a promised land.

When you start talking about elections being rigged, you're pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets on a runaway American dream.

Cause down the shore everything's all right.

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

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

At night I wake up with my sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head.

You get used to anything, sooner or later it just becomes your life.

A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.

Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see? Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest Stranded in the park and forced to confess To hiding on the Backstreets.

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say -- you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.

The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.

The moment you begin to depend on audience reaction, you're doing the wrong thing. You're doin' it wrong, it's a mistake, it's not right. You can't allow yourself, no matter what, to depend on them.

She's a walkin', talkin' reason to live.

You can hide beneath the covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain. Waste your summer praying in vain, for a savior to rise from these streets.

A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

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

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

You've always got to remember, rock and roll's never been about giving up. For me, for a lot of kids, it was a totally positive force... not optimistic all the time, but positive. It was never -- never -- a bout surrender.

There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.

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

The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.

Now everyone dreams of a love faithful and true,
But you and I know what this world can do.
So let's make our steps clear so the other may see.
And I'll wait for you...should I fall behind wait for me.

No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who's driving.

So let's take the good times as they go and I'll meet you further on up the road.

Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.

The man on the radio says Elvis Presley's died. We drove to Memphis, the sky was hard and black.

I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by.

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.

Lesson: In the real world, ninety-nine cents will not get you into New York City. You will need the full dollar.

I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.

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

After 'Born to Run,' I had a reaction to my good fortune. With success, it felt like a lot of people who'd come before me lost some essential part of themselves. My greatest fear was that success was going to change or diminish that part of myself.

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

I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.

The Jersey Shore is the kind of place where the policeman has a little cottage that might have been in the family for years and many other people call home.

I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.

That's what being a front man is all about -- the idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime.

You need two things to remain very, very present. You need to continue to write well and engage yourself in the issues of the day. And you have to continue to make good, relevant records.

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.

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.

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.

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 think politics come out of psychology.

There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.

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.

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

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

Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why.

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.

The only thing I can say about having this type of success is that you can get yourself in trouble because basically the world is set open for you. People will say yes to anything you ask, so it's basically down to you and what you want or need.

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

No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work.

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

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.

When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.

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.

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.

In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.

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.

I didn't know if it would be a success-ful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter.

From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life.

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

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.

I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life -- certainly by the time you're 18.

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.

I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off, so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly.

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.

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

You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation.

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 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.

And whether you're drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.

When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.

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.

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.

The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.

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

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

I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.

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.

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 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.

You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.

The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune.

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.