Top 50 Steve Earle Quotes

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

You know, I’m not comfortable with people whose politics are static in a democracy.

I don’t believe that songwriting has to be profound, but I truly believe that it’s a crime for you to go outta your way for it not to be.

Music was very influential on me as a kid.

Funerals are a pagan rite. There’s not any doubt about it.

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

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

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

The human race survived the Inquisition. We can survive. It’s like the Anne Frank quote: ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good at heart.’ Given what happened to her, it’s one of the miracles of the world that she said that.

I don’t usually read reviews.

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.

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.

Me, I’m spiritually retarded, I need to be knee deep in water with a fly rod in my hands, that’s about as close to God as I get.

New Orleans is a unique environment.

Every country that’s ever been the most powerful country in the world ceases to be the most powerful country in the world at some point.

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

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

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

I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it’s not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I’m on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.

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

My spiritual system is 12-step programs. That’s the only one I’ve ever had. I didn’t have one before that.

I don’t think I’m a political songwriter as much as I am just a political person. I think it’s in my fabric.

The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn’t kick me out of his class. He turned me on to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’ I had picked up Dylan with ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn’t heard.

I’m used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

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

In New York, I’m around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

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

All we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It’s part of learning the craft.

My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.

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

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’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’m from Texas. I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was 19 years old, and it is really beautiful in Tennessee.

You can listen to carpenters talk for hours in Ireland. The people have a relationship to words that I don’t think you will run into anyplace in the world.

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 mainly read non-fiction, and that’s probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don’t know.

We’re so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there’s something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you’re going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn’t have to be this big, negative bummer.

As much as I’d like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that’s who comes to see me.

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It’s not the best environment for that sometimes.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I’m killing somebody.

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.

I’m a country singer, and I’m comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don’t understand why it’s that big a deal.

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

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the ’30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

I don’t really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.

It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.

I grew up counterculture. I’m essentially a hippie, and I’m essentially a folkie.

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.

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