U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

‚Nothin‘ on You‘ by B.o.B was the first song where I heard myself on the radio. I’d been trying my whole career to write a song like that, which incorporates live instruments with hip-hop and singing.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‚how-to-parent‘ strategies both seductive and dangerous.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

There’s no point in making predictions. It’s not worth speculating because nothing is set in stone and things change all the time in football. Today there are opportunities that no one knows if they will come round again in the future.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It’s like going from nowhere to nowhere.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.