Steve Earle Quotes

Every day on Earth is another chance to get it right.

The reason music became so powerful to our generation is that it's art you can consume in your car, and we were driving around a lot.

Maybe I'm not as big a star as Bruce Springsteen because I'm not as good.

I don't know. It doesn't matter. I still have an audience of a certain size. I think it's one of the things I'm luckiest.

Me, I'm spiritually retarded, I need to be knee deep in water with a fly rod in my hands, that's about as close to God as I get.

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad.

I believe he was evil in the first place.

I'm a very disciplined person when it comes to my work, but discipline can't save m from being a drug addict.

Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction.

In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

Back then, the business depended on bohemians.

... They needed Kristofferson and Roger Miller ..It was the tail end of something...the last Tin Pan Alley. ...and we were the night shift! They gave us keys, because they knew the best songs weren't written in daylight.... We got our keys taken away several times...me and Guy Clark.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.

I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist, just by selling 100,000 records. I don't sell millions of records, and I don't need to.

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

We're Americans. I don't consider us to be evil, I just don't think we know any better. We're a really young culture. We're hillbillies, and the rest of the world sees us that way. I travel all over the world, and probably the only worse rednecks than us are the Australians. And they're an even younger country.

Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly.

What saves me from being a drug addict is sort of the opposite.

It's me realizing that I don't really control anything.

It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.

I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.

Critics are notoriously liberal with their use of the term 'genius'.

I don't care what's happening in the mainstream of country music. I haven't in a long time.

My politics were really radical when I was younger, and then I moderated like everyone else does when they start having kids.

I had everything I need to get me killed.

My gift's primarily literary. That being said, I ended up a musician. By the time I made the bluegrass record...I'm more impressed with myself when I push the envelope musically than I am when I push it literality.

I really believe that if I make records that are indispensable to my audience, they'll go out and spend money to buy them, even if they've already downloaded them. If they can afford it. If they can't, I'd rather they be able to download it than not get it at all.

The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn't kick me out of his class. He turned me on to 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.' I had picked up Dylan with 'Bringing It All Back Home,' and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn't heard.

Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me.

I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.

I'll never believe that Americans have racticed in our history anything close to the purest form of democracy of the world. Because there are lots of democracies around the world that function better than ours does. It's always been that way. There's some truth to the idea that it's rigged, but there is a way that it's supposed to work that.

By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD .

.. I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.

I don't type fast. I type with three fingers - two on one hand, and I only get one going on the other. I think my thumb's in there, but I'm not sure. I may be no better than an orangutan when it comes to that.

Bob Dylan emerged from nowhere, like an alien. And that was just the start.

Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.

I was comparatively late in understanding Bob Dylan's overwhelming importance as a songwriter. Everybody who does my job exists in the shadow of Bob Dylan. There are two categories: Dylan and everybody else. It's as simple as that. And it's going to be that way until he dies.

What's important is you wake up in the morning and something doesn't exist, and when you finish you day's work something is in the world that wasn't there before.

You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.

I can deal with conservatives in a democracy. With real conservatives, I don't agree with them, but I understand why they believe what they believe and I believe they're being honest with me about it.

I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world.

Records are only one-dimensional. Even film is only one-dimensional. That's why music and live theatre is so important, because it's not the same thing. A recording is just a record of part of the experience, but it's not the whole experience.

I'm trying to make records where people don't feel cheated. Nashville has been guilty of insulting the Country Music audience for years and years.

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

My audience doesn't agree with me on everything, but I love my audience, because they're totally okay with us having a dialogue.

Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore.

I think the music business is changing. Artists that don't want to tour and just want to collect royalty checks and stay home are not going to be able to do that.

I'm not a Democrat; I'm something well to the left of a Democrat, but I'm just realistic about the system.

My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.

My therapist says that I choose women that I couldn't possibly succeed in a relationship with because I really want to be alone. Which sounds complicated and convoluted to me, but I don't know. Maybe she's right. There's a part of me that wants that.

People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.

I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.

I'm not going to waste a second feeling sorry for myself because I'm not a bigger star than I am. I can walk down the street in most places in the world and I still drive really nice cars.