Happy Birthday Bruce 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.

I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.

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.

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.

Talk about a dream, try to make it real.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

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.

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.

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.

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