“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”