Steve Earle Quotes
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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.
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I'm a very disciplined person when it comes to my work, but discipline can't save m from being a drug addict.
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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.
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I feel like I owe my audience something. They feed my kids. And I really like my job, a lot.
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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.
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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.
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I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.
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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.
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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.
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I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Having a child at 55... that's optimism.
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Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion, too.
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Critics are notoriously liberal with their use of the term 'genius'.
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New Orleans is a unique environment.
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I still write more songs about girls than anything else.
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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.
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If I can get Me out of the way, I can do anything.
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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.
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From the moment Bob Dylan arrived as a songwriter, he was so much better than everybody else around.
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Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me.