U2 was involved in Live Aid, and I ended up going to Ethiopia and working there for some time with my wife, Ali.
When you’re open, a hitchhiker – a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them – can become an angel.
Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.
Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.
If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?
Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.
Songs are my prayer.
There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything.
The stuff of the great operas. U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera – a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day.
We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock ‘n’ roll solar system is the van.
Doing my homework one day, in the little box room in Cedarwood Road, I looked out the window as Guck Pants went by on a unicycle. Playing the trumpet.
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.
Fame is a currency. I want to spend mine on the right stuff.
I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn’t need to. I felt the pinch of wonder.
I’m lost, I’ll probably always be lost.
I’d given myself a license to look back, to lift up stones under which I knew lay creepy-crawlies.
Suicide offers quick authority over a life that feels it has lost all agency.
The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of “higher power” better be in charge, because you certainly aren’t.
Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man’s-land is yes-man’s-land.
The search for common ground starts with the search for higher ground, even with your opponents, especially with your opponents... You don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough.
I’m drawn to conversation because in the best kind you don’t know where you’re going, only that you will get somewhere good.