Bono Quotes

Our fans were often the same age as us, and we would prove to ourselves and them that we were the real punks. We were zealots of a kind with a determination not to surrender our values to the big cities, but rather bring them our true punk values like respect for the people who were paying to see us. We’d make it our business to stop and talk, to sign autographs. We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to. And as the singer, I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd, by rubbishing the very idea they were a crowd. This was not just a nucleus of unstable atoms banging into each other; this was a gathering of sentient beings who for those few hours every night played the most important role in the drama, transporting the band and therefore themselves to some place neither had been before. Finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.

In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows they learned to swim

We begin by looking out for our children, and in time, if we are so blessed, we find they are looking out for us.

There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.

These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I'm the sort of character who's got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I'm going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it's sort of underpinning for me.

It is not an exaggeration to say U2 began to write our own songs because we couldn’t play other people’s. Baby steps for a baby band.

It was a line on our second album, October, that led from one record to the other. In 1981, a young man, I’d sung, “I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me.” Now, in my fifties, I found myself writing something different: “I can change the world, but I can’t change the world in me.

When you’re open, a hitchhiker — a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them — can become an angel.

which begs a question. What precisely is genius? I believe that genius is not a person but a process, a process in which someone determines to uncover their gift and, for a period, is able to step inside it. The “gift” is a self-explanatory state, and like a prize awarded in a DNA lotto — say, being born into beauty or into wealth — genius is no reason for arrogance.

I like my heroes to be alive,” she told me. “I like them to grow old.

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.

Over the years there have been times when I’ve been mesmerized by a figure in my imagination that I mistook for someone real. A crush that could have crushed my partner’s feelings. At such a moment, while you may not be in control of who or what is beguiling or besotting you, you are in control of what you do about those feelings. The choices you make. Romantic love can enlarge a person or shrink them. Sometimes the most convincing act of love is to just let someone be who they are. Without you. As a songwriter I am attracted to any territory or subject that’s just out-of-bounds, a someone or something new who might take my imagination by surprise. As a man too. This can be problematic. I can have a crush on a person who doesn’t exist. Ali finds other obstacles in the way of her love. Were there days when both of us might resent the obligations our marriage makes of each other? Sure, but neither of us would want to live outside each other’s love as expressed through this old-fashioned but still functional construct called marriage.

One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...

Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud.

These goals — clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty — these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a Globalised World.