Top 445 Quotes & Sayings by Bruce Springsteen
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Bruce Springsteen.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician.
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 think politics come out of psychology.
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.
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.
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.
It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.
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.
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.
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.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
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.
On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience.
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.
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.
Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult.
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.
While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at 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.
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.
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 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.
There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.
When it comes to luck, you make your own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.
I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by.
If you're good, you're always looking over your shoulder.
There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.
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.
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 grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
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.
Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music.
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.
A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written.
A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
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.
Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.
I looked at myself, and I just said, 'Well, you know, I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.' So I said, 'Well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.'
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
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.
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.
It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people.
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.
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.
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.
Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
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.
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.
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.
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