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Too many people dwell on the past: the thing is to get on with life.

I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

There are some songs where you're like, 'I really like this song,' and it just didn't work out how you thought it would. That's life. You win some, you lose some. You can't dwell on it. I can't be worried about the past.

When you learn a Bruce Springsteen song, it's like learning to ride a bike. You don't forget it.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.