Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Van Zandt - Page 2

When I was younger, I went through the windshield of a car ,and my hair didn't grow back right. I had been wearing scarves occasionally, and I decided that I didn't want to deal with wigs and things, so I just stumbled onto my thing.

'Born to Run' was a mixture of things but mostly about youth and fantasies.

Little Steven - the songwriter, producer, and arranger - stayed alive doing the 'Lilyhammer' score. That pretty much took up three or four years of my life, and all of my musical energy went into that.

In 'The Sopranos,' these guys know their best years are behind them. They have nostalgia for their old traditions. In their minds, they're looking for a time when loyalty mattered, community mattered. E Street is about community, too. People are looking for something real.

It's a challenge every year with a TV series. You want to keep evolving and keep it going. That's part of the fun.

Politics, in general, when you're trying to change the world for the better in any kind of way, no matter how small or how big, it's inches.

Every successful person needs to have at least one person in their life who's not afraid of them.

My father was an ex-Marine Goldwater Republican.

Believe me, if Donald Trump didn't have some point that he's making, hitting home with people, he could not have come this far - as much as a showman as he may be.

Boycotts are not something to be taken lightly.

They legislate fatherhood in Norway. It's not an option. That's a shocking thing to us in America.

Primal Scream could be the biggest band in the world. They are fantastic when they make rock records - once every 10 years.

Sometimes there's no qualitative difference between two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half hour shows. It's just a matter of how long you do it. It's not like the show must be three hours and 30 minutes to work. That's just not the case.

This conversation with the audience has been going on since, what, '72, '73... Sometimes it's like a conversation after dinner with friends. You're in a restaurant, and you got there at 8 o'clock. Suddenly, you realize it's midnight. Where did the time go? You're enjoying the conversation. It's sort of a natural, organic conversation.

Let's not pretend we have too much of a democracy here, because we don't.

The River,' to me, meant 43 songs.

Stevie Van Zandt could not walk on to a set and act. I don't know how actors do that! It's the scariest thing in the world.

I've always had a reluctance to meet my heroes.

I believe that hundreds of years from now, history will be divided into pre-1960s and post-1960s.

I did nothing but international liberation politics for ten years, and usually it was like, you gain an inch, you lose a half an inch. It's slow going, man.

Before Dylan, before rock became art, it was a wonderful fusion of pop structure and personal statements.

For me, it all comes down to one issue: if we can get money out of political systems, the whole world will change.

I learned everything I know from leaving the E Street Band. And of course, one of the things I learned is, I never should have left.

Whatever I'm doing, I try and keep the quality very high.

Little Richard opens his mouth, and out comes liberation.

Your celebrity capital rises and falls in any given year. And when you have some - temporarily, usually - you try to use it for some good.

I think I'm one of the few people who have experienced New Jersey becoming fashionable twice in a lifetime.

I was very lucky with 'The Sopranos.'

I tell everybody, if you've got a band that works, it's a miracle. It's never going to be perfect, but if it works on some level, hold on to it with both hands and don't ever let it go.

Go out and support your local rock n' roll band.

I tried to get Primal Scream to come over to America several times.

Being a rock n' roll star ain't a part-time gig.

People want to learn how other people live. It's just human nature.

The rock era, as I clock it, went from '65 to '94, from 'Like a Rolling Stone' to Kurt Cobain's death.

I'm very, very proud to have been at what I feel are two of the pivotal moments in this whole new Golden Era of television - one being 'The Sopranos' with HBO and now with Netflix expanding that whole HBO concept to the world and making it more of a global thing. It's been wonderful to witness that from those two vantage points.

For those who are familiar with my work, 'Soulfire' is a return to how most people identify me, which is that soul-meets-rock thing.

'Soulfire' is a collection of stuff I've done in the past. Each song is an element of who I am: There's a doo-wop song on the album; a blues song, R&B and some jazz. For people who are going to be hearing me for the first time, it's an introduction to who I am.

It ain't passive. It ain't TV. Go out there and rock n' roll and dance and have fun.

Garage rock is music for older people with young souls and young people with old souls. It's a certain sensibility, and you may have it when you're 17 or when you're 67.

Rock n' roll is a participatory sport.

I tend to personally judge issue by issue rather than sort of endorsing this football-team mentality that we fall into in this country, where it's all about the team.

I'll never understand why people somehow support pollution. It's completely irrational, and I don't get it. Somewhere along the line, they bought into this fiction that one has to choose between the environment and business, which is just a complete falsehood and absurd.

I was 100 percent political in the '80s - the first time around, let's call it, my first life as an artist.

You're either on the Republican team or the Democratic team, and all that matters is that your team wins. Judging by history, regardless of which team wins, the people always lose.

I learned a lot from Bruce Springsteen and David Chase.

Part of the job of being a producer is the Vulcan mind meld, where you listen not to what they're saying but what they mean.

Bands should never break up.

Netflix completely shook up the world.

You have to love what you're doing in order to find the energy.

Anytime you spend six months on a song (Born to Run), there's something not exactly going right. A song should take about three hours.

Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.

I didn't make that much money... Once I joined Bruce (Springsteen), I took a huge pay cut.

Enuff Z'nuff is one of the most underrated bands in the world!

As most of the population suffers through life, barely surviving, disappointed and confused day after day, hopeless, wondering what happened to their strong and beautiful country, it is in the medias power to restore, if not some of our quality of life, at least a bit of our peace of mind.

I have lost a brother and a best friend. The world has lost one of the greatest actors of all time.

Half of the acting I do is actually done by the hair.

Touch the earth, speak of love, walk on common ground.

I have a bigger mission than any kind of specific politics, which is trying to restore the accessibility of rock 'n' roll.

I was in the back of the car with my girlfriend, the Rascals came on the radio and I realized their song was sexier than the sex I was trying to have.

I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.