Top 60 Bruce Springsteen Quotes

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 was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety, which all would have been very familiar to my pop, you know? Except it was a part of himself he was trying to reject, so I got caught in the middle of it, I think.

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

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

Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.

The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it’s essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

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.

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.

I had tried to go to college, and I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus – I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.

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

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 never felt I had enough personal style to pursue being just a guitarist.

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

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.

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

A good song gathers the years in. It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written.

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 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.

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

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.

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.

I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns.

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.

I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician.

The name ‘Boss’ started with people that worked for me… It was not meant like Boss, capital B, it was meant like ‘Boss, where’s my dough this week?’ And it was sort of just a term among friends. I never really liked it.

You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.

In America everything’s about who’s number one today.

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

You’re always in a box, and you’re an escape artist if you do what I do – or if you’re a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That’s ongoing.

At the time, there was a great disagreement over ‘The Wild and the Innocent,’ and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn’t do it, and they basically said, ‘Well hey, look, it’s going to go in the trash can.’ That’s the record business, you know.

When it comes to luck, you make your own.

Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn’t get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.

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

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.

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.

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

I think there’s only eight songs on ‘Born to Run’ – I don’t think it’s much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense – though we weren’t thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.

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 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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody’s different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous.

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

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.

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.

When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that’s what other people who I admired did. That’s what Bob Dylan did, that’s what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.

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

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad’s life, and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Most bands don’t work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult.

But then I go through long periods where I don’t listen to things, usually when I’m working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.

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.

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

Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn’t get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.

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 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.