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

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

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

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

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism."

"I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music."

"You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it."

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

"I always wanted to be a singer, it's what I wanted to do since I was little. I'm doing it now and I couldn't be happier."

"There are so many soulful singers, even the ones coming from London, like Adele and Jessie J, who are just amazing. It feels like a really cool time to be making music now."

"Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths."

"I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music."

"The lyrics aren't literature. they're just part of the story."

"People who know our music, they know who you are. They've been in the dark room, they know you better than your best friend, because you don't sing like that to your best friend, you don't sing in their ear."

"I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness."

"Music can change the world because it can change people."

"I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid."