1974
"My father never has much to say to me, but I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he's driving himself crazy thinking about these things. And yet he sure ain't got much to say when we sit down to talk."

"I have the discipline to make myself write. I used to write every day on the buses, on the streets, but I tend to be more critical now, that's why I haven't written much recently."

"The mistake is to start thinking that you are your songs. To me a song is a vision, a flash: I see characters and situations."

"There's outlets for a lot of different things in our shows, a lot of different emotions. It runs the gamut, from violence to anything. It runs through lots of different outlets. We try to make people as close to it as they want to get."

"I mean, you play all the time half sick but it got to the point where I couldn't play piano, I was spitting blood. I don't get sick a whole lot but this year we have been. We've done so many gigs this past year that it just starts to collect ... the fatigue."

"Usually we won't play any place over 3,000 - that's the highest we want to do. We don't want to get any bigger. And that's even too big. I'm always disappointed in acts that go out and play those places. I don't know how the band can go out and play like that. I don't know how Joni Mitchell can do it. You can't. You can't effectively do it."

"All I know is that those big coliseums ain't where it's supposed to be. There's always something else going on all over the room. You go to the back row, you can't see the stage, talk about what's on it. You see a blot of light. You better bring your binocs ... especially our band - it would be impossible to reach out there the way we try to do. Forget it!"

1975
"I've got some great musicians in my band and I'm paying them terrible money. I pay myself the same, but it's terrible for me too. I mean, we're barely making a living scraping by."

"I just sit around and fuck around for a couple of hours. Usuallty something comes up. I sit down and I work on the song, and I sit down and work on it some more, then some more and some more."

"The writing is more difficult now. On this album ('Born to Run'), I startet slowly to find out who I am and where I wanted to be. It was like coming out of the shadows of various influences and tryiung to be me. You have to let more out of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it gets more personal."

"I was fighting myself all the time, you know. Always do that. Everybody's hard on themselves; well, I take it to an extreme sometimes, where it starts like being self-defeating. In a way it's good because I think in the end you do pull out the best stuff, but it's really a mind-breaking project. It'll freak you out. You get frustrated and you go nuts."

"Every time you get on stage, you have to prove something. It doesn't matter if they've heard you or not. The kid on the street will make up his own mind. The music is what really matters. That's the way it has always been."

"When Bruce Springsteen sings on his new album, that's not 'fun', that's fucking triumph, man."
(Pete Townshend)

"If I was with Springsteen, his records would be clearer and better and he'd sell five times as many."
(Phil Spector)

"This Bruce Springsteen stuff drives me crazy. I wouldn't want to be him for all the money in the world. He's good, but he's not that different from a lot of people out there. I think he's got development to go through. He's nowhere near as good as his hype."
(Stephen Stills)

"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."

1976
"See, I'm not into people screaming at me, like Bowie, once they do that, it's over. I'll go back to playing the small clubs. I'm not there for them anyway. I'm there for me, you know. If they can dig it, cool, if not, they don't have to come."

"... Every time I go over to see my Mother she makes me look at my yearbook, you know, she says: 'Come on sit down look at the yearbook with me' I say 'Ah Ma, I look at that thing every time I come over here.' OK so I sit down I look it and on the first page, like the dog ate the cover off it, but on the first page, on the inside there's this stuff, from this girl, you know. I forgot she wrote me, you know and it was stuff like...'Good luck' ... 'in the future and 'I know that we'll always be in love and at least, you know, my half will' and "When you touch me it feels like nobody else' 'We'll be together forever ... and she ran off with this guy that ran this gas station down on the highway. These are life's little lessons, you know it's like...forever, it's (giggle) that's such a long time sometimes (laughing). But in my heart I still love her so...so wherever she is tonight ... Rosy, come out tonight."

1977
"My main thing was that it shouldn't feel like work. When I was a kid playing guitar, what I was trying to figure out was how to avoid work. So I worked it out, and when it started to get a little too much like work, my immediate impulse was to go away and go have fun, you know? But I guess it's got to be like that sometimes."

"They wouldn't let me in the bars because I wouldn't play Top 40. You should know the New Jersey shore bars, the people who smile at me today who wouldn't let me in the places then. It's true. Number one, they said I drew a bad crowd, an undesirable crowd. It wasn't a physically violent crowd, it was just kids, kids like me. But they didn't dig the kids."

1978
"For six years my mother and father and sister have been following me around, trying to make me come back home. Every time I come into the house they say, 'It's not too late, you could still go back to college.'"

"My father, he used to give me a hard time all the time, he never used to let up. It was always, "Turn it down, turn it down, turn it down". So tonight, I've go three million watts. I'm playing a hundred times louder than my stereo ever was - and he comes to see me."

"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. The old priest got mad."

"I was dead until I was 13. I didn't have any way of getting my feelings out. Then I found this thing. I was a drummer, but I wasn't working enough to buy a set of drums. So I bought a guitar."

"All these guys used to surf every day. I was friends with them all but never went. Finally, they got me. One afternoon they were merciless. They just kept taunting me and kidding me about not surfing that i just sort of got me riled. I grabbed a board and we all headed out to the beach. I must have been some sight surfing for the first time but I'll tell you something - I got the hang of it pretty quick."

"We used to play the Elks Club, the Rollerdome and the local insane asylum. One time this guy in a suit got up and introduced us for 20 minutes saying we were greater than The Beatles. Then the doctors came up and took him away."

"My first guitar was one of the most beautiful sights I'd ever seen in my life. It was a magic scene. There it is: The Guitar. It was real and it stood for something: 'Now you're real'. I had found a way to do everything I wanted to do."

"I tried to live in California for a very short time but I soon found out the place held nothing for me. Musically I preferred what was going on in New Jersey. I didn't need to get a job because I could make money playing in the clubs."

"The main reason I started doing my own arrangements and writing my own songs was because I hated to pick them up off the records. I didn't have the patience to sit down and listen to them, figure out the notes and stuff."

"Rock 'n' Roll, man, it changed my life. It was like The Voice of America, the real America coming into your home. It was the liberating thing, the out. Once I found the guitar, I had the key to the highway."

"It's a little easier to lead the band without the guitar. You can get a little better picture of what you're going for."

"I'm always jumping into the audience, when they're not jumping into me."

"See, we originally started off with a two hour set. But when the tour got underway we found it impossible to keep it down to that. It was hard for me to leave anything out. So now I play as long as it feels right. Some nights it's too long and others it ain't long enough."

"The greatest thing is going backstage after the show and seeing some kid there, not screwed up on drugs, but someone whose face is all lit up. It's like you've done something to get things stirred up inside his head. That's the whole idea - get excited, do something ... be your own hero."

"They even come around to my house and wait for hours outside. I got a kid sister back in San Fransisco and when she tells her friends who her brother is they go wild. Ain't that just amazing?"

"At every date he goes out and sits in every section of the hall to listen to the sound. And if it isn't right, even in the last row, I hear about it and we make changes. I mean every date too."
(Bruce Jackson)

"In all my years in this business he is the only person I've met who cares absolutely nothing about money."
(John Hammond)

"When you make more than $500 a night, you get more than $500 problems."

1980
"I come from an area where there was not a lot of success. I don't know anyone who made a record before me. I didn't know anybody who had made anything."

"Even my mother when I told her I had a recording contract said 'What'll you call yourself now?' But who you are, it's obvious isn't it? The one thing I learned is to be real."

"The songs I write, they don't have particular beginnings and they don't have endings. The camera focuses in and then out."

"See, it's their night. You may get sore, you may get hoarse, but when you see all those kids out there it's like the first show all over again."

"What happens is that a lot of the security in a lot of places don't understand. Kids get real excited, but they're not mean, they're just excited."

"It was about a spiritual crisis in which man is lost. He's isolated from the government, isolated from his job. That happens in this country (USA), don't you see, all the time. It seems to be part of modern society. I don't know what anybody can do about it."

1981
"In the summertime, when the weather got hot, I used to drag my mattress out of the window and sleep on the roof next door to the gas station. And I watched these different guys - the station closed at one and these guys, they'd be pulling and pulling out all night long. They'd be meeting people there. They'd be ripping off down the highway."

"One day my father said to me 'Bruce, it's time to get serious with your life. The guitar thing is okay as a hobby but you need something to fall back on. You should be a lawyer, they run the world.'"

"Rock 'n' Roll is a means of erasing the past. You have to want to get away from something pretty bad. I wanted to perform. I wanted to travel. I wanted to feel free."

"The details in the songs are always secondary, which doesn't mean they aren't important to get right. But detail alone is just detail. I have a lot of songs sitting in my notebook that are full of detail, but missing the emotion which ties the whole thing together and breathes life into it."

"I'm on stage for three hours and every muscle in my body is, like, tight for that three hours. I feel like I got a stick up my back."

"If I leave the stage feeling, 'Well, if I played just one more song, maybe somebody out there would be won over'. If I feel I could have given more, it's hard for me to sleep that night."

"A lot of it is real instinctive. "Hungry Heart" I wrote in a half hour, or ten minutes, real fast."

"I was renting a house on this reservoir, and I didn't go out much, and for some reason I started to write. I was interested in writing smaller than I had been, writing with just detail. I guess my influence at that time were the movie (Terence Malick's Badlands) and these stories by Flannery O'Connor."

"He's older and wiser but he never strays from his basic values. He cares as much, more, about the losers than the winners. He's so unlike everything you think a real successful rock star would be." (Roy Bittan)

"All the characters, they're part of the past, they're part of the future and they're part of the present. And I guess there was a certain frightening aspect to seeing one that wasn't part of the future. He was part of the past. To me, that was the conflict of that particular song. I loved it, we used to play it all the time. And there was that confusion too. Well, if I love playing the damn thing so much, why the hell don't I want to put it on the record?" (Bruce on 'Out in the Street'

1982
"I asked my sister, "What do you do for fun?" "I don't have any fun," she says. She wasn't kidding."

"Some of those club owners were crazy. There was one guy, pulled out a gun one night and shot an amplifier. Can you see it? Smoke curling up to the ceiling. Absolutely quiet. And he says, 'I told you guys to turn it down'."

"When I was 18 and playing in this bar in California people would come up to us and say, 'Hey I really dig you guys! Where ya from?' And I'd say New Jersey and they'd just go, 'Yech! Ech!'."

"The subject I sing about is not necessarliy what I sing about. I'll use situations and probe for the very basic emotions. The conflicts I sing about are present in every level of life from the street level to the business level."

1983
"When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me and the other was my guitar. We had this grate, like the heat was supposed to come through, except it wasn't hooked up to any of the heating ducts; it was just open straight down to the kitchen, and there was a gas stove right underneath it. When I used to start playing, my pop used to turn on the gas jets and try to smoke me out of the room. And I had to go hide out on the roof or something."

1984
"He had been so disappointed (his father), had so much stuff beaten out of him ... that he couldn't accept the idea that I had a dream and I had possibilities. The things I wanted, he thought were just foolish."

"The whole thing of ... When I was 15 I wanted to play the guitar, I wanted to have a band, I wanted to travel. I wanted to be good, as good as I could be at the job. I was interested in being good at something that I felt was useful to other people, and to myself."

"When I started I just wanted to play rhythm guitar. Just stand back and play rhythm; no singing or anything. But I found out I knew a little more than I thought ... more than the other guys that were in the band (The Castiles)."

"Rock 'n' Roll has been everything to me. The first day I can remember looking into a mirror and being able to stand what I saw was the day I had a guitar in my hand."

"I don't know what I'm writing from, but the main thing I've always been worried about was me. I had to write about me all the time, every song, because in a way, you're trying to find out what that 'me' is. That's why I chose where I grew up, and where I live, and I take situations I'm in, and people I know, and take them to the limits."

"My audience, I hope, would be all sorts of people, rich and poor, middle class people, I don't feel like I'm singing towards any one group of people. I don't want to put up those kinds of walls, that's not really what our band is about."

"A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it. It needed that kind of austere, echoey sound, just the one guitar - one guy kinda telling his story. That was what made the record work - the conversational sound like you were just meeting people and they told you what either happened to them or what was happening to them."

"There were songs that didn't get on to "Nebraska" because they didn't say anything in the end. They had no meaning. That's the trickiest thing to do and that was my only test of songs: Is this believable? Is this real? Do I know this person?"

"America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a young man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about." (Ronald Reagan)

"I will always desire to play with Bruce Springsteen. He's the most inspirational, most dedicated, most committed and most focused artist I've ever seen. I like to be around people like that." (Max Weinberg)

"We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school."

1985
"Before Rock 'n' Roll, I didn't have any purpose. I tried to play football and baseball and all those things and I just didn't fit. I was running through a maze. It was never a hobby. It was a reason to live. It was the only one I had. It was kind of life or death."

"You write a song just for yourself, but it's no good unless you play it for somebody else. That's the connection between people that is forever lasting and can never be broken apart."

"The shows aren't a casual thing, even though they are filled with fun and wildness. There should be beauty, but there's also got to be ugliness and brutality. If you don't have all of that in the evening, you're not doing it. If you turn away, that's the beginning of the end. That's what you spend your time doing - trying not to turn away."

"I'm real lucky. I get to have a little bit of my dream every night."

"I'm out there doing something at night that I can never get from anything else. I guess I feel most at home on stage."

"I wanted to make it feel like you meet somebody. The "Nebraska" stuff was like that. You meet somebody and you walk little while in their shoes and see what their life is like. And then what does it mean to you? That's kind of the direction my writing is going in - it's just the thing I find most satisfying. Just saying what somebody had to say and not making too big a deal out of it."

"... just one thing ... One thing in your whole life that you can do that makes you feel proud of yourself ... And that's not too much for anybody to ask ... That's not much ... I don't think..."

"When I sit down to write, I try to write something that feels real to me. Like, what  does it feel like to be thirty-five or something right now, at this point in time, living in  America? It's not much more conscious than that. I generally try to write songs that are about real life, not fantasy material. I try to reflect people's lives back to them in some fashion. And if the show is really good, your life should flash before your eyes in some way - the show's long enough, that's for sure! I think on a night when we're really good, you can come and hopefully you can see your relationships with your parents, brothers, sisters, your town, your country, your friends, everything -- sexual, political, the whole social thing. It should be a combination of a circus, a political thing and a spiritual event, And hopefully you'll come and your life will flash before your eyes. That's kind of what I'm out there trying to do, you know?"

1986
"I remember I got in a motor-cycle accident once and I was laid up in bed. My dad had a barber come in and cut my hair and I can remember telling my dad I hated him and I would never, ever forget it."

1987
"Me and my first band were out in the middle of the country somewhere when we first went out on the road. We were broke and didn't have much money to get back. I remember calling my mom up and she said those magic words, "You can always come home.""

"I was the guy with a lot of energy and I would just look for places to put it."

"If you grew up in my generation part of the dream of rock 'n' roll was eternal youth, the endless Saturday night."

"I have a lot of desire to control my output, to control what's coming out. Writing a good song is never easy but it's not as pained and I don't put myself through a lot of extraneous bull like I used to 10 years ago."

"The only trick to writing a new song is you have to have a new idea. And to have a new idea, you've got to be a bit of a new person, so that's where the challenge is."

"Among those 100 (fans) there's at least one for whom you're a hero. He saved money to see you. That's what I did, I played for that guy."

"After the shows I usually go home and eat my dinner at 2 am and sometimes I go out and take a walk; there is nowhere open. I like to go out in the city at night, it's quiet and nice in the summertime. I come back and sometimes I read or play some music and get some sleep."

"If you get a good band and play your stuff real well and present it in a clear and concise fashion - and the audience is receptive, which the audiences have been - then you can do whatever you want to do."

"A lot of it is about being there which is why we haven't done much television or the video thing which allows too much distance. Our band is about breaking down distance."

"Playing big arenas is not that different. It just means being mentally aware of the audience. It is not that different from playing a theatre. the crowd is very important to the show. I like playing stadiums quite a lot."

"When I go on stage, my approach is "I'm going to reach just one person" - even if there's 80 000 people there. Maybe those odds aren't so great, but if that's what they are, that's okay."

"You may be playing 80 shows in eight months, but this kid out there, it's his money, and it's his one night. He may not see you again for a year. So you mustn't let him down."

" 'Nebraska' was rock bottom. I came home from tour and I sat down for two months and I wrote the whole thing. I recorded and mixed it in my bedroom and put if out on cassette. I always think of it as my most personal record. What happens when all the things you believe in when you are 25 don't work? What happens when all these things just break down? Your friends fail you, or you fail your friends. When you're alone - can you live? Can you go on?"

"Mainly all my records try to offer some sort of survival course. Maybe you can't dream the same dreams when you're 34 that you did when you were 24, you know, but you can still dream something. Maybe you've got to downsize some of your expectations. I know I have. Just in growing up, in accepting childhood. My characters, I think that's what they do."

"As I get older I write about me, I guess, and what I see happening around me and my family. So that's "Born in the USA"."

"I wasn't satisfied with the "Born in the USA" record. I did not think I made all the connections I wanted to make on it."

"He's so good, you really want to hit him now and again. He'd come to rehearsal and he'd write five songs in a day, and he'd do that all the time, whenever he felt like it."
(Steve Van Zandt)

"The first time I saw Bruce he was opening up for Jethro Tull, before he had a record deal. (...) I went to see Bruce because I was singing in that area with different bands and I wanted to get in a good rock band and he had the best rock band." (Patti Scialfa)

"From the very first beat it was like magic. It just felt together." (Max Weinberg)

1988
"I like Bruce. It took me a long time to like him, it's taken the past three years. I think he always manages to produce one dynamite classic per album." (Joe Strummer)

"The release of the 'Tunnel of Love' album is a more important Catholic event in this country than the visit of Pope John Paul II."  (Rev Andrew Greely)

1992
(From a radio interview)
Moderator: So there's no truth in the rumour that 57 Channels was written for Bono, was there? (laughs)
Bruce: (laughs) I don't think so, no. Hey, I wrote it as a joke one night sitting in front of the TV.

"The guy in 'Living Proof' is the same guy as the one in 'Born to Run,' except he's covered a lot of miles in between."

"I think I saw the image somewhere in a book. (...) When I started I planned to write a nice song about my kids. It just took a funny turn. It was one of these songs like 'Highway Patrolman' in that there was a certain inconclusiveness to it that always made me feel like it wasn't finished. I kept trying to make it nice and neat, to tie up the ending and make it more concrete. After I recorded it I thought, 'I didn't quite get it on this one.' But then it started to come out and I realized it was right the way it was. It's one of those songs you don't consciously write - it comes up out of your unconscious or subconscious. That's why it's better than the stuff you slave over. I haven't tried to really interpret it." (Bruce on 'My Beautiful Reward'

"You know, I spent such a long time, you know you write music, you write with the hopes that there's an audience out there for it, and you write it with the hopes -- I think when I started, the idea was I, I was gonna write what it felt like to be somebody like me just growin' up in America in the past couple of decades. And, you write it sorta with the idea and the hope that it finds its way into people's lives and becomes a useful thing, an inspiring thing, and something that'll help get you through the day and make you want to dance for a while or put a smile on your face, uh [the crowd erupts into a thankful frenzy of support here], uh, so I guess I just wanna say thanks for lettin' my music in your life. Here, this is for you."

1994
"I grew up in a little town where I wasn't interested in what they were teaching me in school. None of my friends... they were all in the same boat as I was and so were my folks. There was nothing coming... there was nothing getting in there. It wasn't a house where there were books or where there was any kind of cultural thing happening."

"I wanted to see the Beatles once. My father hated it... Great! (laughs) He was like... we used to fight. He used to want to see Bonanza, which was on the same time as Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. We used to battle over that TV... life or death. And it was frightening. I think it was something... it was more than this."

"When there are walls between people and there is a lack of acceptance, you can reach for that particular kind of communion: "Receive me, brother" is the lyric in the last verse. That's all anybody's asking for-basically some sort of acceptance and to not be left alone. There was a certain spiritual stillness that I wanted to try to capture." (Bruce on 'Streets of Philadelphia)

1995
"With the E Street guys, we were like a family, like neighbors. In some ways, they were the physical realization of the community I imagined and sang about in the songs. There was a very deep symbolic importance."

"If anybody could make you dream that was Bruce Springsteen!" (Melissa Etheridge)

"I wrote it in '82, when I wrote the 'Nebraska' stuff. The idea is that murder has been incorporated into society very systemically, a system that basically has set itself up so that violence is one of its byproducts. The whole idea of a constant class of disenfranchised people seems to accepted as the price of doing business. That's what the song is about, and it is probably more relevant now than when I wrote it." (Bruce on 'Murder Incorporated')

"I wrote it very quickly, one of my men-and-women songs. It's about the unknowability of people in general. The record I was working on [last year] touched on that... how difficult it is to know even ourselves. We live with a very limited scope of our own identities unless we are pushed or pressed into moments when we surprise ourselves either pleasantly or shockingly in some fashion." (Bruce on 'Secret Garden')

"It is a pretty tough little song in some ways, yet it has a carrying-on spirit to it. You've always got to feel there is tommorow. I want to hold that idea and pass that hope to my children and my fans and their children ... that hope." (Bruce on 'This Hard Land')

1999
"It's the greatest job in the world. It was great even before I made a record. That's the reason they don't call it working, they call it playing."

"Stevie, you sexy thing!"

2002
"The band is like church. We're gonna shout that thing right in your face."

"If I have a good trait, it's probably relentlessness. I'm a hound dog on the prowl. I can't be shook!"

"One of the most natural musicians I've ever met. His accordion brings a sound - the beach, the boardwalk, y'know, folk music - into my music." (Bruce on Danny Federici)

"That unique voice - I don't know - it's like sawdust and silk or something mixed together. And she's just always had it. It's a little Dusty Springfield, a little Ronnie Spector." (Bruce on Patti Scialfa)

"He's a great guitarist, a voice that is inimitable, and mainly, me deep, deep sidekick and deep friend." (Bruce on Steve Van Zandt)

"He's the engine driving the machine. His professionalism, and his long-time knowledge of how I work, we go to rehearsal - it's like sign language, just the way I look at him. It's the slightest flick of the hand, it's the slightest move of the elbow, and he's all over me on that stuff." (Bruce on Max Weinberg)

"And we are in concert. The word 'concert' doesn't mean that the band is performing for you, it means that you are in concert with the band that evening. And you have a part and a position to play. And if we're going to take this thing as high as we can get it, which is my serious intent when I come out at night, then I need to be in concert with you."

2003
"Hello Gelsenkirchen, wo immer das ist." (where the hell is that)

"It's time to come on up for the British ass rising!"

"Well, the incredible vocal stylings of Little Steven. Come on Steve!"