Steve Earle Quotes

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

If there is such a thing as a workaholic, I'm it, and that's what passes for leisure.

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.

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.

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.

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

You know, I'm not comfortable with people whose politics are static in a democracy.

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.

In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

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'm constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I'm forced to.

Music was very influential on me as a kid.

Every country that's ever been the most powerful country in the world ceases to be the most powerful country in the world at some point.

I don't usually read reviews.

What saves me from being a drug addict is sort of the opposite. It's me realizing that I don't really control anything.

At home, I'm lucky if I can write three or four hours before the phone starts ringing and the kids want to go to soccer.

You can listen to carpenters talk for hours in Ireland. The people have a relationship to words that I don't think you will run into anyplace in the world.

Their life together was filled with bright mornings and starlit nights that consistently outshone the darker times between. Even those hard days were times of learning when their differences became gifts from one to the other.

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

Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.

New Orleans is a unique environment.

They say death and taxes are the only things that are inevitable. The truth is, you can not pay your taxes. I've done it, and there's consequences, but it can be done. Death you're not going to get out of, and you kind of got to deal with it.

I love 'Harry Potter.' I love those books. That started because I lived with a woman who had kids who were, like, 10 and 7 when they moved in with me.

I'm a country singer, and I'm comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don't understand why it's that big a deal.

I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it's not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

[T]he death penalty dehumanizes everyone on both sides of the equation. It dimishes everyone it touches. It is something we just shouldn't do.

I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know.

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now, and I never get tired of the view.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept 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.

She more than likely came from good enough people. Poor, honest, hard-working folks that never got ahead but did all right as long as they kept their heads down and didn't study too much on what they didn't have.

I've been a serial husband, and I've done it badly every time.

Assail me not with noble policy, for I care not at all for platitude. And surrender such tedious detail to greater minds than mine and nimbler tongues, singular in their purpose and resolve
and presuming to speak for everyman.

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

Introduced Doc to the miracle of morphine. From that very first shot it was as if he'd discovered the one vital ingredient that God had left out when He'd sent Doc kicking and screaming into the cold, cruel world.

I don't really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.

I had everything I need to get me killed.

What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.

I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.

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.

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

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

I promise you that I did not become an addict because of anything to do with the behavior of either of my parents. Everybody has to make their own choices.

Someday I'm finally gonna let go 'cause I know there's a better way, and I wanna know what's over that rainbow ... I'm gonna get out of here someday ...

All we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It's part of learning the craft.

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.

Lonely's a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell and then makes the sunshine seem even brighter after it travels along. Like when you're far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you're never going to see them again. But you will, and you do, and then you're not lonely anymore.
Lonesome's a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. So big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddamn world can fill it up because you dug it yourself and you're digging it still, one lie, one disappointment, one broken promise at a time.

When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.

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.

Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.

My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.

I ain't ever satisfied ...

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

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

Actually, in its purest form, Islam is incredibly tolerant. That makes what's going on in the world really bizarre.

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

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

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

I have spent most of my life (like most people) avoiding transcendence at all costs, mainly because the shit hurts.

As he left room 817, Nguyen turned for one final look before he allowed the soldiers to enter and remove the body. Nguyen thought that the American looked almost serene, lying there, his face bathed in the first rays of the sunlight of a new day, the sound of his laughter still suspended like dandelion seeds in the air nearby, resonating in harmony with that of a former enemy's.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.

I just had a child on purpose at age 56, I'm pretty f
ing optimistic.

There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.

I feel like I owe my audience something. They feed my kids. And I really like my job, a lot.

He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.

San Antonio is like a military town. It's like literally - when I was growing up there, there were five Air Force bases, plus Fort Sam Houston. I was always sort of near the military.

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

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.

You know I ain't never prayed before 'Cause it always seemed to me That prayin's the same as beggin' Lord, I don't take no charity.

I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.

I've never made a record that I'm ashamed of.

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

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.

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.

The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.

The human race survived the Inquisition. We can survive. It's like the Anne Frank quote: 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good at heart.' Given what happened to her, it's one of the miracles of the world that she said that.

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.

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

You can go out and find ways to make your own record and get it out there now. If you really want to, you can be heard. Keep things simple. Learn to go out and play solo. That's a really really good thing to learn, if you're a singer-songwriter. Don't be dependent on a band because you may not always be able to afford one.

I still write more songs about girls than anything else.

I'm from Texas. I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was 19 years old, and it is really beautiful in Tennessee.

The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.

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

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

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.