Bono Quotes

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

With crowds I was cocky, too comfortable in the big picture. Wide-screen. I knew I could love at scale, but could I survive the intimacy of the close-up?

There is anyway a kind of off-color romance to a deserted seaside town in the winter,

Music can change the world because it can change people

When John Lennon sings, "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open" — these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.

I wouldn't run for President. I wouldn't want to move to a smaller house.

Let me tell you something. I've had enough of Irish Americans who haven't been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home; and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What's the glory of taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory of bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age-pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where's the glory in that? To leave them dying, or crippled for life, or dead, under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don't want. No more! Sing No more!

If your heart was hard, that would be better / You could only break it once or twice / After that it would be rid of blood and you could let it turn to ice.

Baby's got blue skies up ahead
But in this, I'm a rain-cloud
Ours is a stormy kind of love

You belong only to the here and now. This is no Oceanus of faceless faces; you are trying to make eye contact with everyone. But you can’t … until you can. If you get it right, you’ve not just eyeballed everybody in the front row; you’ve eyeballed everybody in the venue. And there’s no one who doesn’t think you might follow them home, that you might pick their pocket or preach them your gospel or make out with them. Or their sister. Contact has been made, real and imagined.

You torture me. I try to control you. We fall out. We don’t speak, and then we go through difficult years. You come out of those years, and then we meet up in your twenties, and then we get close again.” That’s how it often goes, I explain. On the other hand I will add, “We could just, say, skip all that.” And all of them went, “Yeah, let’s skip that.” And they did. Although, of course, if you talk to their mother, who didn’t go off on the road like their father, she might tell you a different story about how the girls might have missed out on me being there to torture and how I might have missed out on that too.

When the potatoes ran out, millions of Irish men, women and children packed their bags got on a boat and showed up right here. And we're still doing it. We're not even starving anymore, loads of potatoes. In fact if there's any Irish out there, I've breaking news from Dublin, the potato famine is over you can come home now. But why are we still showing up? Because we love the idea of America. We love the crackle and the hustle, we love the spirit that gives the finger to fate, the spirit that says there's no hurdle we can't clear and no problem we can't fix.

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to dome very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine that was opened five years ago, and there is a lunch I haven't eaten from last summer. There are faces of children who are going to die but don't have to. There's my fathers face telling me to tidy up my room. So that's what I'm doing - tidying my room.

Love. That’s a big word to throw around.

Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and it's effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance.