Quote collection
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"Look, I wasn't saying the Beatles are better than God or Jesus. I said 'Beatles' because it's easy for me to talk about Beatles. I could have said TV or the cinema, motor cars or anything popular and I would have gotten away with it."
"Life is what happens when you make other plans."
"My original idea for the cover was better - decapitate Paul - but he wouldn't go along with it."
"I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it . . . and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy."
"I started being me about the songs, not writing objectively, but subjectively. I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that - not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work."
"News conference in Chicago, where he apologized for the above statement, which was accepted by the Vatican. (11 August 1966)"
"I don't believe in Beatles."
"Why is everyone telling me to do it? I already did it."
"Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be."
"From this moment on I know exactly where my life will go: seems that all I really was doing was waiting for love."
"I thought of nothing else but rock 'n' roll; apart from sex and food and money--but that's all the same thing, really."
"I don't believe in Elvis."
"Music touching my soul, the spirit dance was unfolding."
"I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am."
"Barney Kessel is incredible. He's just amazing . . . . Nobody can play guitar like that"
"I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme."
"I'm an Elvis fan because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool."
"That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be."
"I had a lot of it in my day, but I don't like it. It's a dumb drug. Your whole concentration goes on getting the next fix. I find caffeine easier to deal with."
"In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was."