I got Mary pregnant and man that’s all she wrote. And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a factory coat.
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.
In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.
A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.
We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I’ll buy whatever catches my attention.
Tonight I’m stepping lightly and I’m feeling no pain.
I want a thousand guitars.
I want to spit in the face of these badlands.
The first day I can remember looking into a mirror and being able to stand what I saw was the day I had a guitar in my hand.
I spot a little stranger standing across the room, my brain takes a vacation just to give my heart more room.
From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life.
I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us.
No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who’s driving.
When Springsteen meets a future girlfriend on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, he delivers this electric introduction: “She was Italian, funny, a beatific tomboy, with just the hint of a lazy eye, and wore a pair of glasses that made me think of the wonders of the library.
First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.
We are a nation of immigrants and no one knows who’s coming across our borders today, whose story might add a significant page to our American story. Here in the early years of our new century, as at the turn of the last, we are once again at war with our “new Americans.” As in the last, people will come, will suffer hardship and prejudice, will do battle with the most reactionary forces and hardest hearts of their adopted home and will prove resilient and victorious. I.
We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis, you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry.
On a good day this is how we live. This is love. This is what life is. The possibility of finding root, safety and nurturing in a new season.