U2 Quotes
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Weirdly enough, if I'm having trouble with a guitar part - not the playing of it but the writing - I'll mess around with echo and other effects, just turn everything up and make it as crazy as can be, and it winds up taking me somewhere. I've found so many guitar parts from echo. It's limitless.
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I'm a singer, not a politician, and I think you don't want the two to get confused. It's not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.
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The thing about The Dubliners is - line'em up, the hardest rock'n'roll bands in the world, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Oasis, Nirvana, U2 - we're all a bunch of girls next to The Dubliners.
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The problem for most people as they get older is that they start to buy into their own bullshit to the extent that they just have to eliminate from their inner sanctum anyone who is going to really challenge it. But I think all bandmates of U2 were lucky enough to have the four of us respect and regard each other to the extent that we're kind of always looking out for one another, so none of us can get away with buying into the bullshit.
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Can you imagine your second album - the difficult second album - it's about God? Everyone is tearing their hair out and Chris Blackwell says, 'It's okay. There's Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, it's a tradition. We can get through it.
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What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.
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There's a thin line between interesting music and self-indulgence. We crossed it on the Passengers record.
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First love is alright, as far as it goes. Last love – that’s the one I’m interested in.
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Bono is chairman and founding member of Over-Achievers Anonymous. He has an irrepressible drive to be great. He wants to achieve it all, which actually makes him very vulnerable.
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When those people get up at the Grammys and say, "I thank God", I always imagine God going, "Oh, don't, please don't thank me for that one. Please, oh, that's an awful one! Don't thank me for that - that's a piece of crap !"
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When John Lennon sings, 'Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open' - these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.
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One of the good things about globalization is it has created a single international music community, and I feel very much part of it.
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I think it's hard to come to a U2 show and just eat hot dogs and drink a soda, and not be moved by it.
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If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex. Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation.
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The less you know, the more you believe.
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God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
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Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.
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Sing the melody line you hear in your own head. Remember, you don't owe anybody any explanations, you don't owe your parents any explanations, you don't owe your professors any explanations.
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The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.
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Unfortunately, as far as the music is concerned, what defines relevance is whether you are on the radio or whether you are on the cover of a magazine or whether you're winning MTV awards, and so on and so forth.
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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.
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A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader.
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We had a street gang that was very vivid - very surreal. We were fans of Monty Python. We'd put on performances in the city center of Dublin. I'd get on the bus with a stepladder and an electric drill. Mad shit. Humor became our weapon. Just stand there, quiet - with the drill in my hand. Stupid teenage shit.
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Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was - which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.