We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn't actually try it until after we'd been to Hamburg. I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, 'This stuff isn't doing anything.' It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, 'This stuff doesn't work, man.'

The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them.

I never surf (the Net). I don't know the password.

Music should be used for the perception of God, not jitterbugging.

It is an outrage that people can take other people's lives when they obviously haven't got their own lives in order.

The Beatles saved the world from boredom.

A lot of people went underground with their spiritual life in the seventies, but they're out there in little nooks and crannies and in the countryside, people who look and dress straight, insurance salesmen types, but they're really meditators and chanters, closet devotees.