Latest Bruce Springsteen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The music is pretty relentless. You've got to find some way of letting the audience breathe for a minute, give them a little bit of air - but not too much. Otherwise it would get real intense. The room would get very tense.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Real, Giving, Breathe

  Source: www.sfgate.com

• "Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Running, Song, Night

  Source: www.npr.org

• You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Song, Jobs, Nice

  Source: www.npr.org

• The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Song, Different, Time Passes

  Source: www.npr.org

• If you see me performing, you're going, that guy is simply the most extroverted guy I've ever seen. But if you've seen me very often on a daily basis and all the while growing up, I was very, very introverted. Very introverted. So I have sort of the extremes of both of those characteristics.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Growing Up, Guy, Characteristics

  Source: www.npr.org

• Physical pain is my friend. I pursue it every night for four hours.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Pain, Night, Four

  Source: www.npr.org

• I had spent about three months where I couldn't sing at all, so that was anxiety-provoking. But after that, I went back out. I sang for two hours in my garage one day to see if I had a voice.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Two, Voice, Anxiety

  Source: www.npr.org

• I tend to be not my own best company. I can get a little lost when - if I don't have my work to occasionally focus me.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Focus, Littles, Lost

  Source: www.npr.org

• If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Blow, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.npr.org

• I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my - my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolf once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Thinking, Peter, Stage

  Source: www.npr.org

• I think initially, our audiences were filled with young men. You know, our initial audience was a lot of young guys who I think were trying to - who you played a bit of a big brother role for and were trying to sort out a lot of the same things right - soon as "Born To Run" hit, you know? So it was something that I worked pretty hard on.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Running, Brother, Men

  Source: www.npr.org

• You're young and you're always in pursuit your young manhood. You're trying to figure out - what does that mean? What does - you know, there's a lot of pressure on young men to sort that out. And, you know, we tend to gravitate towards one-dimensional iconography as far as what it means to be a fully grown man. And you can get lost in so much of it out there.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Mean, Men, Trying

  Source: www.npr.org

• Patti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.

  Bruce Springsteen

  New York, Artist, Jigsaw Puzzles

  Source: www.npr.org

• It took quite a bit of work and time and mistakes to begin to feel - to understand the strength that comes along with building a home life.That was very mysterious to me. I was very skeptical of it for a long time, and didn't understand it fully until Patti [ Scialfa] and I got together.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Mistake, Home, Long

  Source: www.npr.org

• I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Dad, Men, Childhood

  Source: www.npr.org

• And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Song, Motivation, Moving

  Source: www.npr.org

• 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... And so I said, well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Writing, Player, Guitar

  "Bruce Springsteen: On Jersey, Masculinity And Wishing To Be His Stage Persona". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. October 5, 2016.

• What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Artist, Unique, People

  Source: www.npr.org

• The things that I loved about Bob's [Dylan] music - and I describe him in the book as the father of my country, which he really is - were things that just didn't fit when I went to do my job. You know, I'd come out of a somewhat different circumstance and shoes - the clothes just didn't fit.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Country, Jobs, Father

  Source: www.npr.org

• I've always loved the fact that Bob's [Dylan] been able to sustain his mystery over 50 or 60 years.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Years, Bob, Able

  Source: www.npr.org

• By the time I was 19, my parents weren't very authoritative over my life.I didn't have any doubt about that - at that time about what I was going to do or where I was going. I was a musician. I was going to play. I had a band. We were going to make enough money to survive on.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Play, Parent, Doubt

  Source: www.npr.org

• [The Catholic religion] was something I carried with me, never forgot, brought into my music. And it's been in my music ever since.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Catholic Religion, Catholic

  Source: www.npr.org

• When I was young, it was sort of built to intimidate. Even on this very local level in this very small church in this small town, it still held that sort of - held you in the palm of its darkness.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Darkness, Church, Levels

  Source: www.npr.org

• The Catholic religion at the time was much darker and more mysterious. The entire mass was in Latin. The church was - if you go to my church now, it's incredibly bright inside. But at - when I was young, it was very dark inside. And it was just the difference in the way that they've painted it since I've gone there. And it strives for a very different and welcoming spirit.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Latin, Dark, Differences

  Source: www.npr.org

• I think when you're a child, you just cling to the basics, which is the basic story of Jesus and the crucifixion and hell and eternal punishment and the flames. This was all stuff that was - forget when you're young.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Jesus, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.npr.org