Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.
When it comes to luck, you make your own.
I looked at myself, and I just said, 'Well, you know, I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.' So I said, 'Well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.'
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
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.
The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.
We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves.
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.
If you're good, you're always looking over your shoulder.
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.
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.
I was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles.
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music.
Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique.
There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.
I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
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.
Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult.
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.
Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.
I had tried to go to college, and I didn't really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus - I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.
And whether you're drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
The release date is just one day, but the record is forever.
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.
If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance.
