"Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny."

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

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I never felt I had enough personal style to pursue being just a guitarist."

"A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by."

"There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up."

"When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened."

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

"I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is. I got the chutzpa or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good about it, it's going to make a difference."

"Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous."

"I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me."

"You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation."

"You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis."

"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."

"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."

"I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless."

"I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard."

"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."

"While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it."

"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."

"Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier."

"My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that."