Quotes from Bruce Springsteen

A dream of life comes to me, like a catfish dancing on the end of the line.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past.

The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

At the time, there was a great disagreement over 'The Wild and the Innocent,' and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn't do it, and they basically said, 'Well hey, look, it's going to go in the trash can.' That's the record business, you know.

Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.

The name 'Boss' started with people that worked for me... It was not meant like Boss, capital B, it was meant like 'Boss, where's my dough this week?' And it was sort of just a term among friends. I never really liked it.

Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.

I didn't know if it would be a success-ful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter.

I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18.

I wanted to be the reasonable voice of revenge for what I'd seen [my father] life come to.

When you start talking about elections being rigged, you're pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do.

This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.

When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.

The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually.

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.

You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation.

You get used to anything, sooner or later it just becomes your life.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real. You wake up in the night with a fear so real. Spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come. Well don't waste your time waiting.

For me, once I count the band in, and I delve deep into my song, I feel a certain sort of integrity and integration that I rarely find in my daily life.

It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people.

A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written.

In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.