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I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.
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If art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
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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 kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko.
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We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.
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When Yoko Ono and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters - you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.
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It was very romantic. It's all in the song, The Ballad of John and Yoko. If you want to know how it happened, it's in there. Gibraltar was like a little sunny dream. I couldn't find a white suit - I had sort of off-white corduroy trousers and a white jacket. Yoko had all white on.
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The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.
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If you could drink dreams like the Irish streams Then the world would be high as the mountain of morn In the Pool they told us the story How the English divided the land.
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Paul McCartney and I made a deal when we were 15. There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together that we put both our names on it, no matter what.
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Without Jimmy Dean, the Beatles never would have existed.
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Paul and I know each other on a lot of different levels that very few people know about.
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When somebody is angry with us, we draw a halo around his or her head, in our minds. Does the person stop being angry then? Well, we don't know! We know, though, that when we draw a halo around a person, suddenly the person starts to look like an angel to us.
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We went to America a few times and Brian Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George Harrison and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did.
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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.
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Like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I'll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar.
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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.
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Now, in the sixties we were naive, like children. Everybody went back to their rooms and said 'We didn't get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate, and it won't be just pretty and beautiful all the time,' and just like babies everyone went back to their rooms and sulked. 'We're going to stay in our rooms and play rock and roll and not do anything else, because the world's a nasty horrible place, because it didn't give us everything we cried for.' Right? Crying for it wasn't enough.
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In regard to conscription 'I was always thinking I could go to Southern Ireland if it came to it but I didn't know what I was going to do there, I hadn't thought that far.'
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Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion.
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You have to be! You might get shot!
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My life with the Beatles had become a trap... I always remember to thank Jesus for the end of my touring days; if I hadn't said that the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus' and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.
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I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, 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.
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It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.'
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The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.