Bono says at one point about Peterson, “I have to say, in the last years, Eugene's writing has kept me as sane as this is, if you call it sane, which you probably won't. Run With the Horses, that's a powerful manual for me, and it includes a lot of incendiary ideas. I hadn't really thought of Jeremiah as a performance artist. Why do we need art? Why do we need the lyric poetry of the Psalms? Why do we need them? Because the only way we can approach God is if we're honest through metaphor, through symbol. Art becomes essential, not decorative. I learned about art, I learned about the Prophets, I learned about Jeremiah with that book, and that really changed me.”
[Quoting from The Message’s translation of Psalm 40:] I waited and waited and waited for God. At last he looked. Finally he listened. He lifted me out of the ditch. He pulled me from deep mud, stood me up on a solid rock to make sure that I wouldn't slip. He taught me how to sing the latest God-song..”
And Peterson about Bono and his art, “We had a 3-hour lunch. We just had a lovely conversation. It was very personal, relational. He didn't put me on any kind of a pedestal, and I didn't him, so we were very natural with each other. Through that 3-hour conversation, I was just really taken by the simplicity of his life, of who he was, who he is. There was no pretension to him. At that point I just felt like he was a companion in the faith….
[About U2’s song “40,” based on Psalm 40:] I think it's one of his best ones. He sings it a lot. I mean, he does this a lot. It's one of the songs that reaches into the hurt and disappointment and difficulty of being a human being. It acknowledges that in language that is immediately recognizable. There's something that reaches into the heart of a person and the stuff we all feel but many of us don't talk about.