205 Quotes by Bruce Springsteen

We struggled together, and sometimes, we struggled with one another. We took care of one another... In the end, we kept faith in each other.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real.

The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.

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.

cause down the shore everything's all right

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

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything.

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

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

When they built you brother they broke the mold.

The future is now. Roll up your sleeves and let your passion flow. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

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

We gotta get out while we're young, 'cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

You can't start a fire without a spark

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.

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.

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Show a little faith there is magic in the night. You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright, and that's alright with me.

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down That ain't got the faith to stand its ground Blow away the dreams that tear you apart Blow away the dreams that break your heart Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.

For one kiss, darling, I swear everything I would give. Cause you're a walking, talking reason to live.

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

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

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.

There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

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.

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

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

Don't take yourself too seriously. And take yourself as seriously as death itself.

It's time to impeach the president and get a man in there to get us out of this mess.

Nobody wins unless everybody wins.

When it comes to luck, you make your own.

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

A man armed with a rhyming dictionary is a dangerous man.

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

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.

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

At the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers.

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

You can't shut off the risk and the pain without losing the love that remains.

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

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 light from the oncoming train focuses the mind.

You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.

What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?

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.

It's a fairytale so tragic there's no prince to break the spell. I don't believe in magic, but for you I will

You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it.

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

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.

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

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

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 press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power.

It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

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

Just sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it was all just slipping away.

I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.

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.

Everybody's got a hungry heart.

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

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

You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

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

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.

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.

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

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 E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

A dream of life comes to me, like a catfish dancing on the end of the line.

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

I'm ready to grow young again

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

It was like Elvis came along and whispered some dream in everybody's ear

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

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

Nothing matters in the whole wide world when you're in love with a Jersey girl.

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.

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

Judge said, what you got in your defense son? Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

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.

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.

Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free? If you've ever seen a one trick pony then you've seen me Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making his way down the street? If you've ever seen a one-legged dog then you've seen me.

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? Or is it something worse?

Mental illness and creativity are - it's a thin line in between the two. I tend to believe that.

If you're an artist, you try to keep an ear to the ground and an ear to your heart.

Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair. The night's busted open. These two lanes will take us anywhere.

Every fool has a reason for feeling sorry for himself.

Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind I'm ready to grow young again

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.

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.

You've got to be able to hold a lot of contradictory ideas in your mind without going nuts. I feel like to do my job right, when I walk out on stage I've got to feel like it's the most important thing in the world. Also I've got to feel like, well, it's only rock and roll. Somehow you've got to believe both of those things.

Every rock song is some variation of 'Pull down your pants'

This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.

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.

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.

The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little by little, piece by piece.

Somehow all you ever need's never really quite enough.

The one thing I wished for my children is that they'd be readers.

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

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

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

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

If you have written really well, people will swear that it happened to you.

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.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

Most artists I know had one person in their life who told them they were the second coming of the baby Jesus, and another person that told them they weren't worth anything, and they believed them both, you know?

People see you onstage and, yeah, I'd want to be that guy.I want to be that guy myself very often.

The only thing I know as I get older is that I don't really need to be No. 1.

I think politics come out of psychology.

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

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.

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.

When you`re onstage you have a certain faith that somebody's gonna yell somethin' back. Some nights it's louder than other nights and some nights they do, and on some songs they don't. But that's the idea. I think when you begin to expect a reaction from an audience, it's a mistake.

If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance.

Let there be sunshine, let there be rain, let the broken hearted love again.

I'm the kind of person, I think a lot about everything. Nothin' I can do about it. It's like, I'm a thinkin' fool. That's a big part of me.

Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun. Oh, but mama, that's where the fun is.

The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually.

[The Catholic religion] was something I carried with me, never forgot, brought into my music. And it's been in my music ever since.

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

It took quite a bit of work and time and mistakes to begin to feel - to understand the strength that comes along with building a home life.That was very mysterious to me. I was very skeptical of it for a long time, and didn't understand it fully until Patti [ Scialfa] and I got together.

I'm interested in what it means to be an American. 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.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.

Blame it on the lies that killed us. Blame it on the truth that ran us down.

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

I tend to be not my own best company. I can get a little lost when - if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me.

Two hearts are better than one.

To say I'll make your dreams come true would be wrong, but maybe, darling, I could help them along.

In the end what you don't surrender, well, the world just strips away.

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.

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

Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.

Music doesn't tell you where to go. It says, go find your own place. That's what it told me.

We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves.

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.

You ask for your audience's investment in your music; you're in a relationship with them. And their relationship with the E Street Band is separate from whatever else I might do. I like the idea of us being something that people rely on.

Fame, on its best day, is kind of like a friendly wave from a stranger by the side of the road. And when it's not so good, it's like a long walk home, all alone, with nobody in when you get there.

You may not be able to hit all the notes. That's OK. You may not have the clearest tone. You may not have the greatest range. But if you can inhabit your song, you can communicate.

You can't start a fire Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark

"Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song.

We said we'd walk together baby come what may.That come the twilight should we lose our way.If as we're walkin a hand should slip free,I'll wait for you And should I fall behind,Wait for me.

Settle back is to settle without knowing.

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

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.

They put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the Yellow man.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real. You wake up in the night with a fear so real. Spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come. Well don’t waste your time waiting.

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy.

If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, 'a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on'.

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.

She kissed me just right, like only a lonely angel can.

You can't kill your way to security and you can't lead by scaring people.

Ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough: Man meets woman, and they fall in love, But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough. You got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

Did God make man in a breath of holy fire, or did he crawl on up out of the muck and mire?

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out, Packing up our bags, maybe heading south. I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now. Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said, "Son, take a good look around, This is your hometown.

You can beat the drum so hard that people stop listening. I wanted to use my voice wisely and not expend it wastefully.

Here everybody has a neighbor Everybody has a friend Everybody has a reason to begin again.

If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

Unions have been the only powerful and effective voice working people have ever had in the history of this country.

You have moments of clarity, things become clear to you that you didn't understand before. But there's never any making ends meet or finding any time of longstanding peace of mind about something.

The question of whether we were misled into the war in Iraq isn't a liberal or conservative or Republican or Democratic question, it's an American one. Protecting the democracy that we ask our sons and daughters to die for is our responsibility and our trust. Demanding accountability from our leaders is our job as citizens. It's the American way. So may the truth win out.

An unfulfilled life makes a hard man.

It's hard to be a saint in the city.

My dad had a very difficult life, a hard struggle all the time at work. I've always felt like I'm seeking his revenge.

I think you can't demonize somebody that's on the other side of the political spectrum, or you can't generalize about them.

I never start with a political point of view. I believe that your politics are emotionally and psychologically determined by your early experiences.

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

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.

My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city's in ruins, my city's in ruins.

I was unrecognizable to myself; I saw my reflection in a window; I didn't know my own face.

You're young and you're always in pursuit your young manhood. You're trying to figure out - what does that mean? What does - you know, there's a lot of pressure on young men to sort that out. And, you know, we tend to gravitate towards one-dimensional iconography as far as what it means to be a fully grown man. And you can get lost in so much of it out there.

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

The Catholic religion at the time was much darker and more mysterious. The entire mass was in Latin. The church was - if you go to my church now, it's incredibly bright inside. But at - when I was young, it was very dark inside. And it was just the difference in the way that they've painted it since I've gone there. And it strives for a very different and welcoming spirit.

When I was young I was very shy and that was my personality. I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety.

Sky of blackness and sorrow, sky of love, sky of tears. Sky of glory and sadness, sky of mercy, sky of fear.

Don't run back inside, darlin', you know just what I'm here for. So you're scared and you're thinkin' we ain't that young any more...Show a little faith! There's magic in the night. You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right.

When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.

If you see me performing, you're going, that guy is simply the most extroverted guy I've ever seen. But if you've seen me very often on a daily basis and all the while growing up, I was very, very introverted. Very introverted. So I have sort of the extremes of both of those characteristics.

We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.

Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield.

The Clash were a major influence on my own music. They were the best rock 'n' roll band. Thanks, Joe.

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

If the angels are unkind or the season is dark Or if in the end Love just falls apart Well then here's to our destruction Baby let me be your soul driver.

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 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.

Roy Orbison is singing for the lonely, hey, that's me and I want you only.

So I bought a forty-four magnum, it was solid steel cast, and in the blessed name of Elvis, well I just let it blast 'til my TV lay in pieces.

I've found that giving 100% to your job isn't the same as giving 100% of your life to your job. Very often when I thought I was giving 100% of my life to my job, I was simply obsessing over something.

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.

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.

Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

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

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

It doesn't matter what happened last night or the night - or tomorrow night. It's all about what you're doing with this audience right now.

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 couldn't worry about whether I`m gonna make it onstage or not. You can't. You just gotta do it. And if you do, you do, and if you don't, you don't, and then something else happens. That's the point of the live performance.

Most artists I know consider themselves to be phonies, along with the feeling that there's something that you're doing is essential, essential to communicate, and deeply, deeply real.

But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.

Your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts, may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.

Elvis is my religion. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now.

All you can do is show people. You tell stories that are true and compelling.