I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans
When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun.
As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.
Everything is clearer when you’re in love.
Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you’ve got to let it grow.
Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.
The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.
Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.
We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.
Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.
You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.
Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.
If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.
The more I see the less I know for sure.
“Love is the flower you’ve got to let it grow.”
“Love is the answer and you know that for sure”.
“Am I crazy or am I a genius? I don’t think I’m either.”
“Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans”
“I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.”
“I always was a rebel…but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted…and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.”
“When I was a Beatle I thought we were the best fucking group in the goddamn world, and believing that is what made us what we were.”
“The idea of being a rock and roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality. The freedom was great, but then I found out I wasn’t free. I’d got boxed in…The whole Beatle thing is just beyond comprehension…subconciously I was crying for help.”
“My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.”
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.”
“I’m not saying we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a thing, or whatever it is. I just said what I said, and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.”
“I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.”
“We realized there’s something wrong here, if everybody was upset by the fact that two people were naked.”
“Anybody who knows our history knows that we went through all hell together – through miscarriages and terrible times.”
“I think the basic thing nobody asks is why do people takes drugs of any sort? And that question has to be resolved before you can think, well, what can we do for the poor drug addict? Why do we have to have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?..”
“In ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me – a girl with kaleidescope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko.”
“We’ve broken down a few barriers between us, which we had to do because we had two big egos, two individual artists – and with love we overcame that.”
“We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep on watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.”
“Before Yoko and I met, we were half a person. You know there’s an old myth about people being half and the other half being in the sky, or in heaven or on the other side of the universe or a mirror image. But we are two halves, and together we’re a whole.”
“We’re all in a bag, you know?…I was in a pop bag, going round and round, in my own little clique. And she [Yoko] was in her own little avant-guarde clique, going round and round…So we just came up with the word. If you’d ask us what bagism is, we’d say, ‘We’re all in a bag, baby.”
“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or my music, then in that respect you can call me that…I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.”
“People want peace. And you’ve got do sell it and sell it and sell it. So we do the bed-ins and they say, ‘What? They’re in bed? What’s this?’ And all we’re doing really is donating our holiday. We get tired and it’s…more convenient for us to stay in one spot than go around doing press conferences.”
“We haven’t been apart for more than one hour in two years. Everything we do is together, and that’s what gives us our strength.”
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
“Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being posessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…”
“Everything I’ve ever done is out. I don’t have boxes of unreleased stuff. There’s nothing in the files. I can never keep anything unless I don’t like the sound of it or it didn’t work. If I can sing it to an engineer, I can sing it to anyone…”