You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life...but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don't read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2's audience.

The less you know, the more you believe.

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 !"

We can't fix all problems but we must fix the ones we can

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