Bruce Springsteen

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles.

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

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

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.

I was signed to a record label at the same time as my friend Elliot Murphy, who makes great records to this day.

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 I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Theres people that get a chance to do the kind of work that changes the world and make things really different. And theres the kind that just keeps the world from falling apart.

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.

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.

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.

When it comes to luck, you make your own.

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

It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people.

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 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.

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

Most of these most people's stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography.

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.

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.

In a restless heart the seed of betrayal lay.

Settle back is to settle without knowing.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

All I try to do is to write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind 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.

I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.

I think politics come out of psychology.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Lets take the good times as they go and Ill meet you further on up the road...

The marriage-equality issue should be recognized for what it truly is - a civil rights issue that must be approved to assure that every citizen is treated equally under the law.

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.

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

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.

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.

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man. Id sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town. Hed tousle my hair and say son take a good look around. This is your hometown.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real.

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

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