The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this.

Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud.

Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency.

Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, 'Would you take my son with you?' He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

I'm as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes - and I will dare to say to you that I don't think of myself as a celebrity per se.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.