Bono

The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.

The less you know, the more you believe.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.