Top 100 Steve Earle Quotes
#1. I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
Steve Earle
#2. 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.
Steve Earle
#3. 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.
Steve Earle
#4. 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.
Steve Earle
#5. 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.
Steve Earle
#6. My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs.
Steve Earle
#8. Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.
Steve Earle
#9. 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.
Steve Earle
#10. 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.
Steve Earle
#11. He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.
Steve Earle
#12. We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.
Steve Earle
#13. 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.
Steve Earle
#14. 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.
Steve Earle
#15. I have spent most of my life (like most people) avoiding transcendence at all costs, mainly because the shit hurts.
Steve Earle
#16. 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.
Steve Earle
#17. 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.
Steve Earle
#18. I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.
Steve Earle
#19. 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.
Steve Earle
#20. I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now, and I never get tired of the view.
Steve Earle
#21. 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.
Steve Earle
#22. As much as I'd like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that's who comes to see me.
Steve Earle
#23. I feel like I owe my audience something. They feed my kids. And I really like my job, a lot.
Steve Earle
#24. I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.
Steve Earle
#25. 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.
Steve Earle
#26. I have a low tolerance for mediocrity in music and life. I'm into pain and joy and the in-between doesn't interest me.
Steve Earle
#27. Every day on Earth is another chance to get it right.
Steve Earle
#28. 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.
Steve Earle
#29. Music was very influential on me as a kid.
Steve Earle
#30. 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.
Steve Earle
#31. 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.
Steve Earle
#32. If there is such a thing as a workaholic, I'm it, and that's what passes for leisure.
Steve Earle
#33. I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.
Steve Earle
#34. You know, I'm not comfortable with people whose politics are static in a democracy.
Steve Earle
#35. What saves me from being a drug addict is sort of the opposite. It's me realizing that I don't really control anything.
Steve Earle
#36. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.
Steve Earle
#37. I don't really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.
Steve Earle
#38. 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.
Steve Earle
#39. Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.
Steve Earle
#40. Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly.
Steve Earle
#41. I wish I was as sure about things as Bill Monroe was sure about things.
Steve Earle
#42. 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.
Steve Earle
#43. If I can get Me out of the way, I can do anything.
Steve Earle
#44. My audience doesn't agree with me on everything, but I love my audience, because they're totally okay with us having a dialogue.
Steve Earle
#45. My politics were really radical when I was younger, and then I moderated like everyone else does when they start having kids.
Steve Earle
#46. I don't think I'm a political songwriter as much as I am just a political person. I think it's in my fabric.
Steve Earle
#47. 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 ...
Steve Earle
#48. I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.
Steve Earle
#49. 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.
Steve Earle
#50. 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.
Steve Earle
#51. 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.
Steve Earle
#52. I'm not a Democrat; I'm something well to the left of a Democrat, but I'm just realistic about the system.
Steve Earle
#53. 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.
Steve Earle
#54. 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.
Steve Earle
#55. People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.
Steve Earle
#56. I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.
Steve Earle
#57. 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.
Steve Earle
#58. I've never made a record that I'm ashamed of.
Steve Earle
#60. The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die
maybe.
Steve Earle
#61. I've been a serial husband, and I've done it badly every time.
Steve Earle
#62. 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.
Steve Earle
#63. It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.
Steve Earle
#64. 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.
Steve Earle
#65. I love baseball. I'll probably end up one of those old farts who go to spring training in Florida every year and drive from game to game all day.
Steve Earle
#66. My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.
Steve Earle
#67. The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.
Steve Earle
#68. I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.
Steve Earle
#69. 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.
Steve Earle
#70. I still write more songs about girls than anything else.
Steve Earle
#71. Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.
Steve Earle
#72. 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.
Steve Earle
#73. Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.
Steve Earle
#74. Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me ...
Steve Earle
#75. 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.
Steve Earle
#76. Actually, in its purest form, Islam is incredibly tolerant. That makes what's going on in the world really bizarre.
Steve Earle
#77. I am connected to the past in a way that keeps me going forward. 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.
Steve Earle
#78. 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.
Steve Earle
#79. 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.
Steve Earle
#81. It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.
Steve Earle
#82. I had everything I need to get me killed.
Steve Earle
#83. I don't believe that songwriting has to be profound, but I truly believe that it's a crime for you to go outta your way for it not to be.
Steve Earle
#84. 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.
Steve Earle
#85. I have a theory that the people who cook in jails are British chefs.
Steve Earle
#86. My spiritual system is 12-step programs. That's the only one I've ever had. I didn't have one before that.
Steve Earle
#87. 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.
Steve Earle
#88. There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.
Steve Earle
#90. My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.
Steve Earle
#91. My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.
Steve Earle
#92. 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.
Steve Earle
#93. Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
Steve Earle
#94. You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.
Steve Earle
#95. 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.
Steve Earle
#96. 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.
Steve Earle
#97. 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.
Steve Earle
#98. Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.
Steve Earle
#99. I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.
Steve Earle
#100. I'm a very disciplined person when it comes to my work, but discipline can't save m from being a drug addict.
Steve Earle
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