Steve Earle quotes

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

#Believe #Profound #Way

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

#Execution #Victim #Members

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

#Song #Voice #Crafts

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.
-- Steve Earle

#Country #Redneck #Thinking

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

#Song #Writing #Years

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

#Okay #Dialogue #Audience

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

#Islam #World #Bizarre

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.
-- Steve Earle

#Home #Thinking #Artist

To me, religion is an agreement between a group of people about what God is. Spirituality is a one-on-one relationship.
-- Steve Earle

#Agreement #People #Groups

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

#Jobs #Kids #Feels

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

#Fear #Thinking #Obstacles

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

#Believe #Records #Able

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

#Coffee #Cowboy #Boots

Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political "Copperhead Road" is isn't listening very well.
-- Steve Earle

#Political #Listening #Wells

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

#Unions #Ends #Soviet Union

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

#New York #Play #People

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

#Tired #Views #Eight

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

#Country #Nashville #Years

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
-- Steve Earle

#Writing #Stories #Four

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

#Beautiful #Years #Texas

I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.
-- Steve Earle

#Thinking #Democracy #Obvious

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

#Pain #Joy #Tolerance

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

#People #Democracy #Static

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

#Teacher #Couple #Drama

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

#Musical #Becoming #Theater

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

#Hands #Sea #Fishing

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

#Way

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

#Prayer #Causes #Charity

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

#Teacher #Real #Hero

I still write more songs about girls than anything else.
-- Steve Earle

#Girl #Song #Writing

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

#Insecurity #Fiction #Lack Of Education

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

#Ideas #Government #Democracy

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

#Hippie #Grew #Grew Up

If I can get Me out of the way, I can do anything.
-- Steve Earle

#Way

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.
-- Steve Earle

#Simple #Play #Band

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

#America #Justice #Rehabilitation

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

#Soccer #Kids #Home

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

#Country #Powerful #World

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

#Real #Enemy #Taliban

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

#Funeral #Doubt #Pagan

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.
-- Steve Earle

#Writing #Years #People

Having a child at 55... that's optimism.
-- Steve Earle

#Children #Optimism

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

#Thinking #Political #Fabric

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

#Baseball #Spring #Years

I don't usually read reviews.
-- Steve Earle

#Reviews

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

#Believe #Men #Evil

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

#Song #Writing #Guitar

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

#Home #Worry #Mountain

I had everything I need to get me killed.
-- Steve Earle

#Needs

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.
-- Steve Earle

#Dad #Oxygen #Years

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

#Husband #Done

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

#Motivation #Another Chance #Earth

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

#Country #Long #Care

The revolution starts now.
-- Steve Earle

#Struggle #Revolution

New Orleans is a unique environment.
-- Steve Earle

#Unique #New Orleans #Environment

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

#Dust #Singers #Matter

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

#Leisure #Workaholic

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

#Writing #Want #Hardest

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

#Towns #Neighbor #Good Neighbor

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

#Writing #Thinking #Stupidest

I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.
-- Steve Earle

#Heart #Thinking #Criticism

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

#Song #Writing #Cds

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

#Music #Thinking #People

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

#Growing Up #Military #Air

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.
-- Steve Earle

#Song #Taken #Writing

The idea that murder victims' families are best served by continuing the cycle of violence is something that I consider to be not only a lie, but criminally negligent. You lie to victims' families when you tell them they're going to receive closure if they participate in the process and witness the execution of a human being.
-- Steve Earle

#Lying #Ideas #Violence

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

#Hands

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

#New York #People #Creative

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

#Kids #Doe #Radical

Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.
-- Steve Earle

#Song #School #Kids

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

#Song #Writing #Italian

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

#Character #Voice #Trouble

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

#Children #Optimistic #Age

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

#Believe #School #Eye

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

#New York #Cities #People

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

#New York #Cities #Long