Quotes from Steve Earle

I don't usually read reviews.

Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.

It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.

In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.

My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.

I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist, just by selling 100,000 records. I don't sell millions of records, and I don't need to.

I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, trying to compare how many records I've sold or how much money I've made.

What's important is you wake up in the morning and something doesn't exist, and when you finish you day's work something is in the world that wasn't there before.

I have a low tolerance for mediocrity in music and life. I'm into pain and joy and the in-between doesn't interest me.

The reason music became so powerful to our generation is that it's art you can consume in your car, and we were driving around a lot.

I don't care what's happening in the mainstream of country music. I haven't in a long time.

Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political "Copperhead Road" is isn't listening very well.

I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

The human race survived the Inquisition. We can survive. It's like the Anne Frank quote: 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good at heart.' Given what happened to her, it's one of the miracles of the world that she said that.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

To me, religion is an agreement between a group of people about what God is. Spirituality is a one-on-one relationship.

I love 'Harry Potter.' I love those books. That started because I lived with a woman who had kids who were, like, 10 and 7 when they moved in with me.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion, too.

We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.