Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

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.

I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down...Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.

Life is what happens to you while you're planning on doing something else.

I remember a time when everybody I loved hated me because I hated them.

That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously because I think our opposition, whoever they may be in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humour.

In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers' image of themselves as the father-figure.