Bruce Springsteen

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.

I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.

After 'Born to Run,' I had a reaction to my good fortune. With success, it felt like a lot of people who'd come before me lost some essential part of themselves. My greatest fear was that success was going to change or diminish that part of myself.

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.

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.

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

That's what being a front man is all about - the idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime.

I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.

Basically, I was pretty ostracized in my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks- and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real.

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

You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it.

In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.

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

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

All you can do is show people...You tell stories that are true and compelling.

A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.

You've always got to remember, rock and roll's never been about giving up. For me, for a lot of kids, it was a totally positive force... not optimistic all the time, but positive. It was never--never--a bout surrender.

You've got to be able to hold a lot of contradictory ideas in your mind without going nuts. I feel like to do my job right, when I walk out on stage I've got to feel like it's the most important thing in the world. Also I've got to feel like, well, it's only rock and roll. Somehow you've got to believe both of those things.

Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.