Steve Earle

“Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.”

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

“New Orleans is a unique 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.”

“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.”

“I still write more songs about girls than anything else.”

“I don't usually read reviews.”

“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.”

“Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.”

“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.”

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

“In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.”

“You can't write if you don't read.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.”

“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.”

“I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.”

“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.”

“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.”