- When real music comes to me - the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding - that has nothing to do with me, 'cause I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium...those moments are what I live for.
- Will all the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry. [At Royal Variety Performance 4th November 1963]
- God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
- My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
- Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
- We're all Christ and we're all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, T.V., records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication. So Let's use it.
- Love means having to say you're sorry every fifteen minutes.
- 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 about that, I'm right and will be proved right. We're (the Beatles) more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me. I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity. (to London's Evening Standard, 1966)
- [looking back on his "more popular than Jesus" comment] 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.
- I've made two 'discoveries' in my life: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that's a pretty damned good choice.
- (on reconciling with Yoko in 1975, after more than a year apart) The separation didn't work out.
- (late 1960s) My name's not John Beatle, it's John Lennon.
- Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.
- Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
- I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.
- If everybody wished for peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace.
- The more I see, the less I know for sure.
- Elvis really died the day he joined the army. That's when they killed him, and the rest was a living death.
- Before Elvis there was nothing
- [Asked by a reporter if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world]: In the world? He's not even the best drummer in The Beatles!
- Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.
- (on meeting his teenage crush, Brigitte Bardot, in 1968) I was on acid, and she was on her way out.
- Well, we all know about "Yesterday. I have had so much accolade for "Yesterday. That is Paul's song, of course, and Paul's baby. Well done. Beautiful - and I never wished I had written it. [From the 1980 Playboy Interviews]
- My wife forced me to become avant-garde when all I wanted to be was Tom Jones.
- (on hearing that Elvis Presley had died) Elvis dies and his manager lives. Our manager died and we lived.
- (about the song "Help!") I was eating and drinking like a pig, and I was fat as a pig, dissatisfied with myself, and subconsciously I was crying for help. It was my fat Elvis period.
- Eternity is a hell of a long time.
- (at a 1971 rally) OK, so Flower Power didn't work. So what?! We start again.
- [on the song "Mother"] A lot of people thought it was just about my parents, but it's about ninety-nine percent of the parents, alive or half-dead.
- Music is everybody's possession. It's only lawyers who think you can buy and sell it.
- I'm often afraid, and I'm not afraid to be afraid, though it's always scary. But it's more painful to try not to be yourself.
- People think The Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.
- I'm not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don't want to die at 40.
- When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians.
- 'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere - anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugar-coated, it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey.
- We're not the first to say, 'Imagine no countries' or 'Give peace a chance,' but we're carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it from hand to hand, to each other, to each country, to each generation. That's our job.
- I don't belong to any left wing, right wing, middle wing, Black Panthers, white Christians, Protestants, Catholics or nothing.
- [In his last-ever interview on the day he was murdered, December 8th 1980] I consider that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.
- Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just barely possible.
- [Offered mange-tout peas, in a high-class restaurant] Can you put them over there, away from the food?
- In the old days I used to think song writing was this and you know, "I love you" and "You love me" and my writing was something else you know. Even if I didn't think of it quite like that. But then I just realized through Dylan and other people, Bob Dylan - not Thomas, that it is the same thing. That's what I didn't realize being so naive you know, that you don't write pop songs and then you do that and then you do that. Everything you do is the same thing, so do it the same way. But sometimes I'll write lyrics to a song first and then I get the same feeling as Kakky Hargreaves or a poem and then write the music to it after. So then it's a poem sung, sometimes the tune comes and then you just put suitable words to fit the tune, if the tune's doo der loo der loo der la and then you have shagga boo choo cha - you know, you have sound words then, just the sound of it, 'cus it is all sound, everything's vibrations I believe, you know, everything is sound really or vision. And just the difference between sound and vision I'm not quite sure about.
- Sex is the only kind of exercise I bother with.
- [on his father Alfred showing up after the Beatles hit it big]: It was the second time in my life I'd seen him - I wasn't having him in the house.
- 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.
- Here I am in my Hansel and Gretel house, famous and loaded, and I can't go anywhere. There's something else I'm going to do, only I don't know what it is, but I do know this isn't it for me.
- The Beatles haven't got any magic you haven't got. We suffer like hell anytime we make anything, and we got each other to contend with. Imagine working with The Beatles, it's tough.
- I will need to be a lot older before I can face in public the way I treated women as a youngster. (1980)
- Without James Dean, the Beatles would have never existed.
- [on why he chose to publicly apologize for his "Jesus" comments] I couldn't go away knowing I'd created another little piece of hate in the world.
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