"Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches"

"Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him."

"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above,"

"Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose."

"I can, therefore I am."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."

"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."

"Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty"

"Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror."

"In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"

"The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with."

"In America everything's about who's number one today."

"If they had told me I was the janitor and would have to mop up and clean the toilets after the show in order to play, I probably would have done it."

"Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard."

"I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention."

"But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention."

"Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions."

"I think politics come out of psychology."

"Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield."

"If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know."

"An outgrowth of having a long career is that I have a lot of interesting things around that I get to revisit, and someday get to the place where they become something that I want to do next."

"When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways."

"I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done."

"I was signed to a record label at the same time as my friend Elliot Murphy, who makes great records to this day."

"You need two things to remain very, very present. You need to continue to write well and engage yourself in the issues of the day. And you have to continue to make good, relevant records."

"You can't start a fire Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark"

"I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns."

"Now everyone dreams of a love faithful and true, But you and I know what this world can do. So let's make our steps clear so the other may see. And I'll wait for you...should I fall behind wait for me."

"I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs."

"The name 'Boss' started with people that worked for me... It was not meant like Boss, capital B, it was meant like 'Boss, where's my dough this week?' And it was sort of just a term among friends. I never really liked it."

"Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning."

"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."

"The Jersey Shore is the kind of place where the policeman has a little cottage that might have been in the family for years and many other people call home."

"I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie."

"The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence."

"I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate."

"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."

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

"I was real good at music and real bad at everything else."

"The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band."

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

"I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people."

"She's a walkin', talkin' reason to live."

"On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience."

"You ask for your audience's investment in your music; you're in a relationship with them. And their relationship with the E Street Band is separate from whatever else I might do. I like the idea of us being something that people rely on."

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? Or is it something worse?"

"I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in."

"A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written."

"The star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention."