Michka Assayas

“You have so mamy different personas. The one i meet in Dublin, the one who speaks on the phone. There are a few other bonos: the one who writes in the morning, the one who performs in front of crowds, the one who addresses U.S congressmen, and of course the one who now sits on the board of elevation partners. Of course the same person shelters all those different roles.All art is an attempt to identify yourself. You try out many different characters on the way to finding the one that most fits you, and therefore is you. I mean, all children do. I'm adolescence, you see them trying out different sides of their personality. So I'm just exploring and trying to find out what I'm capable of.”

“Look, the job of life is to turn your negatives into positives”

“Time often is forgiving and dismissive of the influences, because they recede. We look at Sgt. Pepper and we go "wow! How did they ever think that up?" but of course, if you got into Paul McCartney's bedroom, found his record collection at the time, you would find out. But the clues are gone. It's like evolution: there are certain pure situations that hang around longer, but the ones that got them there don't have time to leave fossils. We have a giraffe, we have a horse. But where's the horse with the long neck? The link species disappear.”

“My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.”

“I think cynicism often disguises itself as humour.”

“Where that rage comes from? Partly, I would say it's a sense that a life can be taken away from you, quickly, in a dumb second for the dumbest reason. That makes me mad, defensive and protective.”

“The more you experience love, the more full of it you should be. But the opposite sometimes happens, because you fear the loss of life. You fear the vulnerability that can take the goodness of it away. This might have happened because when i was just a kid, i had the sense that your whole life can change with a death in the family. It's like they say - at least i say - It's the loss of money that leads to the love of it. You know, the people who care about money are never the people who made a lot. They're the people who have lost a lot. And I think that might be true in relationships, when if you've lost somebody important to you early on, you live in fear of that the rest of your life. I suppose that's one of the things that I would fear, and that might explain the rage you referred to earlier, which is real in me, at some point, it really is. An odd thing to own up to, but I do know it's true.”

“I think the time that I knew that I was capable of all the things that I disliked the most in other people was, oddly enough, one of the most joyful moments: when our first child was born. And I just felt this love for this beautiful little girl who was so fragile and so vulnerable. Some point around that week, I started to understand why wars were fought. I started to understand why people were capable of cruelty in order to protect themselves and their own. And I was very humbled to realise that.”

“Friendship is higher than love. Sometimes, it's less glamorous, or less passionate, but it's deeper and kind of wiser, I think.”

“I've always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out.”

“So how did you end up making a fool of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?I had a bigger hole to fill.What do you mean?A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.”

“I fell in love with you because there was a mischief in your eyes.”

“He always had this thing about him, that he wouldn't nominate himself to run in the race. But if he was put in the race, he would want to win it. It's a strange thing. He has a healthy disrespect - and respect - for his own ego.He knows what he's capable of, and he would not push himself forward. He would rather hang back in the shadows and be discovered.”

“There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.”

“Bono: But you write. Why do you write?Michka: well, because I'm unable to express things in another way. I often believe that the words that come out of my mouth are not the ones I should be using. I can't cut things loose unless I'm really sure about them. It's good, but sometimes it's an excuse.Bono: That's often an excuse. You have to dare to fail. I think that's the big one: fear of failure. I've never had a fear of failure. Isn't that mad?Michka: that's the maddest thing, but at the same time I think that's the secret. Because you've never been afraid of making a fool of yourself, you've never been afraid of looking ridiculous.”

“I don't like to abuse alcohol-anything you abuse will abuse you back.”

“Rage, there's a rage in me that I have to rely on others, even though I'm very good at relying on others. But at the same time it's uncomfortable at times. Think about that. Isn't that a frightening thing? You rely on your lover, you rely on your friends, and finally you have to rely in what you believe if you want to become whole. But we don't like it. We do resent our lovers, especially the idea of relying on your friends to be whole. That means that on your own, you're  (pause) that old fucking zen idea. You're the one hand clapping. (laughs)”

“There are stories to tell that are not songs.”

“I took a kind of ex-boyfriend initiative. I guess I wanted to know whether the past was still breathing inside of us. Because inasmuch as I had been irrelevant to their destiny for such a long time, I felt they had become irrelevant to my life for too many years. Unconsciously, something inside me rejected this notion and wanted to make it right.”