Bruce Springsteen

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life, and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.

You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.

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.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.

I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination.

I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.

Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.

There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.

My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.

When it comes to luck, you make your own.

Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.

For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn't do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn't fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.

There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning it suggests something opening up.

I think that is what film and art and music do they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

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.

Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why.

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.