Bruce Springsteen

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

At the time, there was a great disagreement over 'The Wild and the Innocent,' and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn't do it, and they basically said, 'Well hey, look, it's going to go in the trash can.' That's the record business, you know. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work. ”