I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

My friends tease me about the fact that if someone seems bad or shady or like they have a secret, I find them incredibly interesting.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

I think I have the nicest fans in the world, and I quite like being surrounded by people if we’re all feeling the same emotion in the same room.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

Everyone I look up to is bringing me into the tech world. You’d be surprised by all the music people in it, invested in it.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

My most important projects have been the building and maintaining of schools and medical clinics for my dear friends in the Himalaya and helping restore their beautiful monasteries, too.

It’s always great to perform at home in the good ol‘ U.S.A.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I was 14, and I fell in love with Pink Floyd.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

Cleveland fans are awesome.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

No press, no television. If my mom calls and says, ‚Did you hear about?‘ I don’t want to know nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music. I shut it all off.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

I don’t even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

Rap was my drug.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

Rock ‚n‘ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I have been singing randomly, obsessively, obnoxiously for as long as I can remember.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

I’m a painter in sound.

At first, I wasn’t really keen on the idea of me being on stage having to sing in front of people.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.