Steven Van Zandt Quotes

My lifelong friend and mentor Frank Barsalona is gone. And the music business as we knew it went with him.

Anytime you spend six months on a song (Born to Run), there's something not exactly going right. A song should take about three hours.

It's become uncool to play other people's songs, and that's absurd. It has got to change. It's the reason why everything's so mediocre.

I have lost a brother and a best friend. The world has lost one of the greatest actors of all time.

Timing really is nearly everything. And what it isn't, circumstance makes up for.

Touch the earth, speak of love, walk on common ground.

Enuff Z'nuff is one of the most underrated bands in the world!

I have a bigger mission than any kind of specific politics, which is trying to restore the accessibility of rock 'n' roll.

I didn't make that much money... Once I joined Bruce (Springsteen), I took a huge pay cut.

Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.

I know what it takes to make a band, how they should interact, what makes a record sound like it's a band - everything having to do with a band, I happen to be into.

Young fans want to know about the past and older fans also want to find new music.

You think your congressman is working all day to get you a job? He may want to. He or she is probably not a bad person. They probably want to do the right thing. But they can't.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

Being a rock 'n' roll star ain't a part-time gig.

Rock music had become my religion. Radio my church. And these DJs my priests, rabbis and gurus.

Rock 'n' roll is a participatory sport. It ain't passive. It ain't TV. Go out there and rock 'n' roll and dance and have fun.

I'd never go onstage in my life without fully intending to do the best show you've ever seen.

I was obsessed with politics in the '80s. I've recovered and I'm feeling much better now, thank you.

We're a little lazy about spirituality in this country.

Let the wealthier countries and corporations of the world fund an Emergency Organization.

We never understood the concept of people going onstage and giving anything less than 100 percent. Maybe that's a blue-collar work ethic, but I call it just ethics.

Ive always considered the government taking one out of every two dollars I earn absolute tyranny.

I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected.

I'm not pretending to be an academic, or to have this down to a science. It's strictly my taste. But there is a connection between everything I play and the sets I put together.

You gotta love everything you do. You just gotta do it.

Half of the acting I do is actually done by the hair.

The first rule of rock and roll is it's all about live. Then you have to learn a second craft, which is making records. It should go in that order.

You have to love what you're doing in order to find the energy.

Once Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings are not cool on country radio, it's time for a new format.

Rock n' roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.