"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."

"'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs."

"The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound, and without that guy making that sound, you don't have a band, you know."

"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."

"The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world."

"Walk tall, or baby don't walk at all."

"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."

"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."

"It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people."

"The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune."

"I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off, so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly."

"Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music."

"I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination."

"Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience."

"But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find."

"I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18."

"Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out... The other two aren't quite into that yet."