"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."

"I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by."

"Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult. Very, very difficult."

"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 suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something."

"I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time."

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

"I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician."

"When you start talking about elections being rigged, you're pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do."

"God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of."

"I don't think people go to musicians for their political points of view. I think your political point of view is circumstances and then how you were nurtured and brought up."

"You'll walk with me out on the wire, cuz baby, I'm just "a "scared and lonely rider, but I gotta know how it feels... I want to know love is wild, babe, I want to know love is real."

"My dad was young; he went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn't seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really."

"I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety, which all would have been very familiar to my pop, you know? Except it was a part of himself he was trying to reject, so I got caught in the middle of it, I think."

"I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life, and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree."

"Talk about a dream, try to make it real"

"We said we'd walk together baby come what may.That come the twilight should we lose our way.If as we're walkin a hand should slip free,I'll wait for you And should I fall behind,Wait for me."

"For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive"

"I'm ready to grow young again"

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

"Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind I'm ready to grow young again"

"I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings."

"More than rich, more than famous, more than happy...I wanted to be great."

"You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above."

"The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be..."

"They say "ya gotta stay hungry"... Hey Baby...I'm just about starvin' tonight!"

"You can't kill your way to security and you can't lead by scaring people."

"Is there anybody alive out there?"

"I'll love you with all the madness in my soul."

"Cause down the shore everything's all right"

"The story I have told throughout my work life I could not have told as well without Clarence."