Quotes from Bruce Springsteen

I am alienating, alienated and socially homeless . . . I am seven years old.

Stay hard, Stay hungry, Stay alive!

I know I'm good but I'm also a poser. That's artistic balance! In the second half of the century, "authenticity" would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors. Put on the work shirt, young man. No big deal. As you get older, it won't concern you. It's just the lay of the land. In your youth, however, you are easy prey for the many tricks of the mind. At this moment, I know my mid is not at its most centered. I can tell because I'm afraid, and that's not my style; I don't need to be, but I am.

We called ourselves Child, and we played the bars and nightclubs of the late-sixties Shore. We played original music with some covers, and the simple fact that we were so good was all that kept us working.

I never wrote completely in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the Dylan comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of "Greetings" came from an unselfconscious place. Your early songs emerge from the moment when you're writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it's been just you and your music. That only happens once.

I decided the world was filled with plenty of good guitar players, many of them my match or better, but how many good songwriters were there?

From my perch on the couch atop the truck I watched our wheels cross the town line, turn left on Highway 33, pick up some speed and head for the ocean breezes and new freedoms of the Shore. With the warm night whistling by me, I felt wonderfully and perilously adrift, giddy with excitement. This town, my town, would never leave me, and I could never completely leave it, but I would never live in Freehold again.

You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're alright.

hailing from Sorrento, Italy, via Brooklyn via Ellis Island.

The rock death cult is well loved and chronicled in literature and music, but in practice, there ain't much in it for the singer and his song, except a good life unlived, lovers and children left behind, and a six-foot-deep hole in the ground. The exit in a blaze of glory is bullshit.

Writing about yourself is a funny business. At the end of the day it's just another story, the story you've chosen from the events of your life. I haven't told you "all" about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don't allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I've tried to do that.

Music on the radio is a shared fever dream, a collective hallucination, a secret amongst millions and a whisper in the whole country's ear.

All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

You manage it (mental health), you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt...These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.

Italian cooking again. The power of the "pinch of death" has

Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there is something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and here.

Was auch immer ihre Beweggründe waren - klug oder unklug, davonrennen oder oder nach Neuem suchen-, es erforderte Mut und Entschlossenheit und das Bedürfnis nach einer letzten Chance, um an die Zukunft zu glauben.

If you travel for years in an integrated band, you see racism in action.

How much sinning could you actually have done at a second-grade level?

People always asked me how the band played like it did night after night, almost murderously consistent, NEVER stagnant and always full balls to the wall. There are two answers. One is they loved and respected their jobs, one another, their leader and their audience. The other is . . . because I MADE them!

Their voices sing, "Listen . . . listen to what this world is telling you, for it is calling for your love, your rage, your beauty, your sex, your energy, your rebellion . . . because it needs YOU in order to remake itself. In order to be reborn into something else, something maybe better, more godly, more wonderful, it needs US.

He became a firefighter, reentering the blue-collar world I'd known so well

A dignified decent living is not too much to ask. Where you take it from there is up to you but that much should be a birthright.

As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.