Steve Earle Quotes
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People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.
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I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view.
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I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world.
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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.
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I don't really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.
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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.
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Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.
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It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.
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I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.