Bono

The great gifts of models are not that they're more beautiful than the next person, it's that they're able to be photographed and not be self-conscious.

They think that the record company came up with the name U2! Or they think that our manager was the person who planned our pathway to success. It couldn't be further from the truth. Paul McGuinness mentored us in principles that proved to be the best there were, and the record company helped us in our journey. But we are very much in charge of our own destiny, and have been always. I think that's really important.

Great relationships, like great songs, deserve better than sentimentality.

I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?

and still am, suspicious of the idea of oneness. I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so. An anarchic thought: We’re one but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, not that we’ve got to, just that we get to.

girls are more interesting than boys, mentally, physically, spiritually.

Music can change the world because it can change people

The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr put it to me like this: “It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.

In the ancient-wisdom literature known as the book of Ecclesiastes, written several hundred years BC, there is a wanderer I borrowed from, a sojourner who discovers that sex, drugs, money, fame … are apparently not the promised land. Instead, says the writer — maybe Solomon — these are the vanities of vanities. The best thing in life, he discovers, is to enjoy your work. To do what you love. The promised land will always be somewhere else. I think I can grasp this.

I’m not sure a professional psychologist would agree, but something in me understands that until we deal with our most traumatic traumas, there’s a part of us that stays at the age at which we encountered them.

If you’re where you should be, you’ll meet whom you need to meet.

The most profound voice of any musician I have ever heard. Joe (Strummer) took his message to the world, and the world listened. He managed to influence more than one generation with his innovative and determined manner, and I am not alone in repeatedly turning to his thoughts and lyrics when searching for inspiration. The Clash was the greatest rock band. They wrote the rule book for U2.

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?

It takes great faith to have no faith.