Top 445 Quotes & Sayings by Bruce Springsteen - Page 4

More than rich, more than famous, more than happy...I wanted to be great.

She kissed me just right, like only a lonely angel can.

There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets on a runaway American dream.

You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past.

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business.

To say I'll make your dreams come true would be wrong, but maybe, darling, I could help them along.

What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.

Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

You can beat the drum so hard that people stop listening. I wanted to use my voice wisely and not expend it wastefully.

Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little by little, piece by piece.

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul.

Here everybody has a neighbor Everybody has a friend Everybody has a reason to begin again.

A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.

...It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

Somehow all you ever need's never really quite enough.

I always felt that the musician's job was to provide an alternative source of information.

The moment you begin to depend on audience reaction, you're doing the wrong thing. You're doin' it wrong, it's a mistake, it's not right. You can't allow yourself, no matter what, to depend on them.

Judge said, what you got in your defense son? Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

Settle back is to settle without knowing.

The man on the radio says Elvis Presley's died. We drove to Memphis, the sky was hard and black.

A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.

The one thing I wished for my children is that they'd be readers.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

Ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough: Man meets woman, and they fall in love, But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough. You got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

It's time to impeach the president and get a man in there to get us out of this mess.

Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man, and i believe in a promised land.

Nothing matters in the whole wide world when you're in love with a Jersey girl.

Music doesn't tell you where to go. It says, go find your own place. That's what it told me.

I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the 'better angels' of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.

Just sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it was all just slipping away.

It's a fairytale so tragic there's no prince to break the spell. I don't believe in magic, but for you I will

We've got no fairytale ending, in God's hands our fate is complete. Your heaven's here in my heart, our love's this dust beneath my feet.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun. Oh, but mama, that's where the fun is.

The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power.

Most artists I know had one person in their life who told them they were the second coming of the baby Jesus, and another person that told them they weren't worth anything, and they believed them both, you know?

If you have written really well, people will swear that it happened to you.

We're gonna play some pool, skip some school, act real cool, stay out all night, it's gonna be alright.

I believe when your children are born that you are reborn in some fashion.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong To Cowardly Lion:"As for you my fine friend, you are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom.Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz "Courage faces fear and thereby masters it."Martin Luther King, Jr. "These days I'm feeling all right'cept I can't tell my courage from my desperation

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy.

Tonight I'm stepping lightly and I'm feeling no pain.

People see you onstage and, yeah, I'd want to be that guy.I want to be that guy myself very often.

You know, my music utilizes things from the past, because that's what the past is for. It's to learn from. It's not to limit you, you shouldn't be limited by it.

[People] are trying to - they're trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems inside of them or in their history. And I think when I unknowingly - when I went to do that, that's what I was - I was trying to integrate all of these very difficult things that I'd been unable to integrate in my life and in my life with my parents.

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

I guess there's just a meanness in this world

It was like Elvis came along and whispered some dream in everybody's ear

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty. And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

You can't kill your way to security and you can't lead by scaring people.

The life of a rock & roll band will last as long as you can look down into the audience and see yourself.

I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

Mental illness and creativity are - it's a thin line in between the two. I tend to believe that.

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 was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.