A Quote by Bruce Springsteen

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.
I grew up in a town where there were no adults over forty who weren't somebody's parents. It was, unfortunately, the kind of town that's a "great places to raise kids" - that's basically code for "there are no adults here who are not parents." I had a few teachers who were kind of weirdo drama teachers and were hugely influential.
Of course you want to keep making good records, but I think there were certain aspects to the indie rock situation at that point where we were pushing the envelope a little bit too far. We weren't happy with the distribution we were getting, and a few other things. So for a lot of ways it made sense for us to jump to a major label right then, and it made sense in terms of challenging ourselves to put ourselves in new situations.
My thing I liked was to challenge guys that were smaller, guys that were supposed to be quicker. Because I think self-consciously I was trying to prove to people it wasn't just my height that was getting me across in these various sports. It was some other intrinsic things that I had that made me a good athlete.
For many years the stakes were clear. There were the Arabs attacking us and us defending ourselves, so basically there were no real problems [between the United States and Israel]. Now there are many small cells, and each of them can destroy on their own. Some can arrive at New York and kill thousands of people.
Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children.. when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain.
You look back at the '95 season, and a lot of those guys were getting mega minutes. Michael Jordan was out playing baseball. We were still winning, won 55 games I think, so those guys were all very content and happy with the way that things were going that year.
I was a young feminist in the '70s. Feminism saved my life. It gave me a life. But I saw how so much of what people were saying was not matching up with what they were doing. For example, we were talking about sister solidarity, and women were putting each other down. We were talking about standing up for our rights, and women weren't leaving abusive relationships with men. There were just so many disconnects.
My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other's only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were - to use a contemporary term I hate - co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other.
The 1960s and 1970s were the real years for independent film, because they were really independent. Plus, there were hundreds of distributors. There were all these companies that basically did exploitation, but they were independent. Now, there are very few independent distributors.
You know, as kids were weren't jazz musicians or anything. But, the circle of friends and the neighborhood I lived in, we were really big Rush freaks and Yes fans. We would listen to 'Close to the Edge' and 'Hemispheres' and '2112' - the more artsy, progressive stuff. Some of the guys were into King Crimson and Genesis and all that.
The scientists I looked up to at the beginning were not Latino. They were famous scientists of many years ago, like Madame Curie. Later, I realized that there were also, but a very few, Latino scientists. There were good ones, but very few, because there wasn't as much a tradition to be a scientist in our culture. But this is changing.
When I was young I thought, 'Yeah, people don't see, they're not recognizing how funny I am, and how talented I am'. And the guys that mentored me were like, 'You just have to keep getting up'. And I look back and they were right. They were all right.
I'd be at someone's house or be up on the roof all day and I'd get lonely - stir crazy - and talk radio became this soothing voice in my life. But the idea that I was making $10 an hour and stacking drywall while these guys were making a few hundred thousand, and they were having a party, and there were Playmates and there were good times, I just couldn't imagine it.
If I were to tell you that my day was all pure wrestling, I wouldn't be honest with you. Because there were crooked promoters. There were a lot of guys that knew that they couldn't even compete with other guys. But to suggest that every match was like that wouldn't be true.
I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he'd have these interactions with them that were strange - he'd usually get run out of town or something. Then he'd end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff.
My parents were real classic rock freaks, so I heard a lot of Zeppelin, Stones, Hendrix stuff. Thankfully, they were also into lots of old soul, too, so we listened to Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire and War. I was so isolated where I grew up (a small town in Pennsylvania) that there was literally no culture.
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