You see, we're influenced by whatever's going. Even if we're not influenced, we're all going that way at a certain time. If we played a Stones record now -​ and a Beatles record -​ and we've been way apart,​ you'd find a lot of similarities. We're all heavy. Just heavy.

What does it mean when a person is such a pacifist that they get shot? I can never understand that.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all. Paul got the record (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) from a French DJ. For three weeks in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan.

And so this is Xmas for black and for white, for yellow and red, let's stop all the fight.

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.

If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was 'Learn to swim. And once you've learned - swim!