Top 60 Bruce Springsteen Quotes

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 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 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.

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’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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.

On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.