Top 90 Steve Earle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Every day on Earth is another chance to get it right.”

— Steve Earle

2. “The revolution starts now.”

— Steve Earle

3. “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

4. “I ain’t ever satisfied...”

— Steve Earle

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

— Steve Earle

6. “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

7. “I wish I was as sure about things as Bill Monroe was sure about things.”

— Steve Earle

8. “I don’t really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.”

— Steve Earle

9. “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

10. “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

11. “I have no doubt in mind that I justify the space I take up in the world.”

— Steve Earle

12. “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

13. “You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.”

— Steve Earle

14. “New Orleans is a unique environment.”

— Steve Earle

15. “I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.”

— Steve Earle

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn’t understand how political “Copperhead Road” is isn’t listening very well.”

— Steve Earle

23. “What’s important is you wake up in the morning and something doesn’t exist, and when you finish you day’s work something is in the world that wasn’t there before.”

— Steve Earle

24. “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

25. “I had everything I need to get me killed.”

— Steve Earle

26. “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

27. “I’m a very disciplined person when it comes to my work, but discipline can’t save m from being a drug addict.”

— Steve Earle

28. “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

29. “I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist, just by selling 100,000 records. I don’t sell millions of records, and I don’t need to.”

— Steve Earle

30. “Maybe I’m not as big a star as Bruce Springsteen because I’m not as good. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I still have an audience of a certain size. I think it’s one of the things I’m luckiest.”

— Steve Earle

31. “People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.”

— Steve Earle

32. “I’m not going to waste a second feeling sorry for myself because I’m not a bigger star than I am. I can walk down the street in most places in the world and I still drive really nice cars.”

— Steve Earle

33. “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

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

— Steve Earle

35. “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

36. “My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.”

— Steve Earle

37. “I’m supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.”

— Steve Earle

38. “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.”

— Steve Earle

39. “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

40. “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

41. “I grew up counterculture. I’m essentially a hippie, and I’m essentially a folkie.”

— Steve Earle

42. “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

43. “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

44. “What saves me from being a drug addict is sort of the opposite. It’s me realizing that I don’t really control anything.”

— Steve Earle

45. “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

46. “Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.”

— Steve Earle

47. “Records are only one-dimensional. Even film is only one-dimensional. That’s why music and live theatre is so important, because it’s not the same thing. A recording is just a record of part of the experience, but it’s not the whole experience.”

— Steve Earle

48. “Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.”

— Steve Earle

49. “Actually, in its purest form, Islam is incredibly tolerant. That makes what’s going on in the world really bizarre.”

— Steve Earle

50. “The reason music became so powerful to our generation is that it’s art you can consume in your car, and we were driving around a lot.”

— Steve Earle