Quotes from Bruce Springsteen

You try to tell people what to think and you end up a little Madison Avenue mind fascist.

There is no evidence of the soul except in tis sudden absence. A nothingness enters, taking the place where something was before. A night without stars falls and for a moment covers everything in the room.

DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don't . . . quit . . . burning.

As we'd slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there'd been only one thing missing: you.

Steve and I caught Neil Young promoting his first solo album, his signature black Gibson plugged into a tiny Fender amp, blowing out the walls of the Bitter End.

Fuck the moon landing, that's just a trick of 'The Man'; fuck you, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, let's rock.

This was a man who didn't see it coming . . . he WAS it coming, and without him, white America, you would not look or act or think the way you do.

I can feel the love I'm a part of surrounding me and flowing through me; I'm near home and I'm standing hand in hand with those I love, past and present, in the sun, on the outskirts of something that feels almost like... being free.

I wanted to collide with the times and create a voice that had musical, social and cultural impact.

in America we're not supposed to leave anybody behind. In a country this rich, it isn't right. 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.

The way I see it, we ate the apple and Adam, Eve, the rebel Jesus in all his glory and Satan are all part of God's plan to make men and women out of us, to give us the precious gifts of earth, dirt, sweat, blood, sex, sin, goodness, freedom, captivity, love, fear, life and death . . . our humanity and a world of our own.

No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who's driving. I'd seen other great musicians lose their way and watch their music and art become anemic, rootless, displaced when they seemed to lose touch with who they were. My music would be a music of identity, a search for meaning and the future.

If they could keep out of jail for this short stretch, most would go on to be the spine of American society - fixing the cars, working the factories, growing the food and fighting the wars.

I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words "I can't wait 'til the army gets ahold of you," sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, "That's good.

The tree sprouts, its branches thicken, mature, bloom. It is scarred by lightning, shaken by thunder, sickness, human events and God's hand. Drawn black, it grows itself back toward light, rising higher toward heaven while thrusting itself deeper, more firmly, into the earth. Its history and memory retained, its presence felt.

And those you are with in the presence of miracles, you never forget.

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

We could survive as musicians only on our little sliver of the East Coast. We had to get back.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume

There is no evidence of the soul except in its sudden absence. A nothingness enters, taking the place where something was before. A night without stars falls and for a moment covers everything in the room.

REVIEW! We had been recognized by a big-time newspaper music critic as Jersey badasses gone to teach those West Coast sissy boys something about THE ROCK!

You count the names of the missing as you count off time

It was time to call on my old paisan Steve Van Zandt.

Oh . . . and I won an Oscar. When I traveled north from LA to show it to my folks, it showed up on the airport x-ray and I had to drag it out of my bag. Upon reaching San Mateo, I walked into the kitchen, where my father was still sitting and smoking like a blue-collar Buddha, and plopped it down on the table in front of him. He looked at it, looked at me and said, "I'll never tell anybody what to do ever again.