Top 445 Quotes & Sayings by Bruce Springsteen - Page 6

Because we lived in the presence of the church and the convent and the rectory and the school 24-7. And this was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers.

Elvis is my religion. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now.

Your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts, may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.

There's people that get a chance to do the kind of work that changes the world, and make things really different. And there's the kind that just keeps the world from falling apart.

Most artists I know consider themselves to be phonies, along with the feeling that there's something that you're doing is essential, essential to communicate, and deeply, deeply real.

I've always loved the fact that Bob's [Dylan] been able to sustain his mystery over 50 or 60 years.

It doesn't matter what happened last night or the night - or tomorrow night. It's all about what you're doing with this audience right now.

When I got into "Anna Karenina" and "Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment," that was the stuff that - that had a big effect on me, because it was so psychological.

But it's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin And can't stand the company. Every fool's got a reason to feelin' sorry for himself And turn his heart to stone. Tonight this fool's halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell And I feel like I'm comin' home.

Go-kart Mozart was checking out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside.

Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.

I told a story with the E Street Band that was bigger and better than I could have done on my own.

What you were singing about was believable and convincing, that's the key to a great singer.

Sister, I won't ask for forgiveness, my sins are all I have.

Me and crazy Janey were making love in the dirt singing our birthday songs.

The music is pretty relentless. You've got to find some way of letting the audience breathe for a minute, give them a little bit of air - but not too much. Otherwise it would get real intense. The room would get very tense.

I think if somebody comes up and simply says, your jobs? I'm going to bring them back. You're not comfortable with the browning of America? I'm going to build a wall. ISIS, I'm going to defeat them. Those are very - it's a simple, but it was a compelling message for a lot of people.

You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.

I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.

T-Bone Burnett once said that much of rock music is simply someone going wahhh daddy.

Your legs were heaven, your breasts were the alter, your body was the holy land.

The different social forces that affected my parents' lives or my friends' lives or I saw around me became essential for me to write about.

You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.

Jack the Rabbit and Weak Knee Willie, you know they're gonna be there. Sloppy Sue and Big Bones Billy, they'll be coming up for air.

I had no credit cards. I had no checks. I was cash only until I was probably 30 years old.

Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free? If you've ever seen a one trick pony then you've seen me Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making his way down the street? If you've ever seen a one-legged dog then you've seen me.

When you`re onstage you have a certain faith that somebody's gonna yell somethin' back. Some nights it's louder than other nights and some nights they do, and on some songs they don't. But that's the idea. I think when you begin to expect a reaction from an audience, it's a mistake.

I heard a political message in rock music. A liberation message. A message of freedom. I heard it in Elvis' voice.

All you can do is show people...You tell stories that are true and compelling.

Small unit democracy, I found early on, didn't work for me.

So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes, is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

I had spent about three months where I couldn't sing at all, so that was anxiety-provoking. But after that, I went back out. I sang for two hours in my garage one day to see if I had a voice.

The Clash were a major influence on my own music. They were the best rock 'n' roll band. Thanks, Joe.

I never knew anybody who was unhappy with their job and was happy with their life. It's your sense of purpose. Now, some people can find it elsewhere. Some people can work a job and find it some place else.

I think when you're a child, you just cling to the basics, which is the basic story of Jesus and the crucifixion and hell and eternal punishment and the flames. This was all stuff that was - forget when you're young.

Politics and life go hand in hand.

Out of the east on an Irish stallion came bounty hunter Dan His heart quickened and burdened by the need to get his man He found Pete peacefully fishing by the river, pulled his gun and got the drop He said, "Pete, you think you've changed, but you have not.

By the time I was 19, my parents weren't very authoritative over my life.I didn't have any doubt about that - at that time about what I was going to do or where I was going. I was a musician. I was going to play. I had a band. We were going to make enough money to survive on.

The things that I loved about Bob's [Dylan] music - and I describe him in the book as the father of my country, which he really is - were things that just didn't fit when I went to do my job. You know, I'd come out of a somewhat different circumstance and shoes - the clothes just didn't fit.

For me, once I count the band in, and I delve deep into my song, I feel a certain sort of integrity and integration that I rarely find in my daily life.

Deindustrialization that I have written about for 40 years left a good part of the American public behind.

You may not be able to hit all the notes. That's OK. You may not have the clearest tone. You may not have the greatest range. But if you can inhabit your song, you can communicate.

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 understand that it's the music that keeps me alive... That's my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses - that's not the American dream. That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them - if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself - then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away.

You hung with me when all the others turned away, turned up their noses We liked the same music, we liked the same bands, we liked the same clothes Yeah we told each other that we were the wildest, the wildest things we'd ever seen Now I wish you would have told me, I wish I could have talked to you Just to say goodbye, Bobby Jean.

A great singer has to learn how to inhabit a song.

I don't know if I know anyone, with the exception of the early inventors of rock music [who wasn't influenced by something].

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

I think 1960s small-town America was very Lynchian. Everything was there, but underneath, everything was rumbling.

I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who lie in service of the truth - artists with a small A. But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hardcore bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style, and a story to tell.

They wanted to know why I did what I did. Well, sir I guess there's just meanness in the world.

Blame it on the lies that killed us. Blame it on the truth that ran us down.

I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell.

My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city's in ruins, my city's in ruins.

My dad was young. He went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. That didn't seem to be in the nature of - in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really. They were - we had a cousin that went to - off to Brown University. It was like a nuclear explosion took place.

I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.

I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my - my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolf once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.

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