Springsteen: "For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in."

Springsteen: "If you're good, you're always looking over your shoulder."

Springsteen: "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."

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

Springsteen: "You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing."

Springsteen: "But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got."

Springsteen: "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."

Springsteen: "Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music."

Springsteen: "I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety, which all would have been very familiar to my pop, you know? Except it was a part of himself he was trying to reject, so I got caught in the middle of it, I think."

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

Springsteen: "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."

Springsteen: "I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music."

Springsteen: "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."

Springsteen: "When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar."

Springsteen: "Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous."

Springsteen: "When it comes to luck, you make your own."

Springsteen: "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."

Springsteen: "All I try to do is to write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it."

Springsteen: "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.'"

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

Springsteen: "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."

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

Springsteen: "I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't."