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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.

Steve Earle

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Steve Earle
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 17
Actor
Guitarist
Mandolinist
Peace Activist
Radio Personality
Record Producer
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Fort Monroe National Monument
Stephen Fain Earle
Short
Poetry
Processor
Fiction
Processors
Word
Area
Song
Separate
House
Guitar
Writing
Areas
Work
Songs

More quotes by Steve Earle

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I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.
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Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political Copperhead Road is isn't listening very well.
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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.
Steve Earle
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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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Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.
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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.
Steve Earle
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The revolution starts now.
Steve Earle
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I was comparatively late in understanding Bob Dylan's overwhelming importance as a songwriter. Everybody who does my job exists in the shadow of Bob Dylan. There are two categories: Dylan and everybody else. It's as simple as that. And it's going to be that way until he dies.
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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.
Steve Earle
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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.
Steve Earle
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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.
Steve Earle
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It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions.
Steve Earle
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The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers it's people from all over the world.
Steve Earle
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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
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I'm not a racist, but I do have to work at not being a racist, because of where I grew up.
Steve Earle
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Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.
Steve Earle
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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.
Steve Earle
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You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.
Steve Earle
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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
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I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.
Steve Earle