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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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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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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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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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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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You have to be! You might get shot!
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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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I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.
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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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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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It's like being possessed: like a psychic or a medium. I felt like a hollow temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another.
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The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.
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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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At the record company meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do, so in the end I just said, 'I think you're daft. I want a divorce.'
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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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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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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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Without Jimmy Dean, the Beatles never would have existed.
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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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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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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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We are all Christ and Hitler. Yoko and I want Christ to win.
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It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult - even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure.
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Music's all right John, but you'll never make a living out of it.