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.
John LennonI think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.
John Lennon[LSD] went on for years. I must have had a thousand trips. I used to just eat it all the time.
John LennonHappiness Is A Warm Gun not about heroin. A gun magazine was sitting there with a smoking gun on the cover and an article that I never read inside called 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' I took it right from there. I took it as the terrible idea of just having shot some animal.
John LennonWhy in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear. Why on earth are you there, when you're everywhere - come and get your share.
John LennonI always like the studio best, once I got the hang of it and the control. I like it because it's complete control
John LennonWhen we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.
John LennonI don't know how much money I've got. I did ask the accountant how much it came to. I wrote it down on a bit of paper. But I've lost the bit of paper.
John LennonIf I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.
John LennonNothing will stop me, and whether I'm here or wherever I may be, I'll always have the same feelings, I'll say what I feel.
John LennonJesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
John LennonI've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
John LennonYou're jeans are full of crap. You're full of beans, you're in you teens. You've lost your mama's road map.
John LennonI've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.
John LennonWhen I was singing about 'All You Need Is Love' I was talking about something I hadn't experienced.
John LennonWe live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.
John LennonIf art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
John LennonMake your own dream .I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.
John LennonFrom our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred 'pop type' music and we preferred what is now called 'underground'. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrast in tastes, I'm sure, did more good than harm, musically speaking, and contributed to our success.
John LennonPeople are just up tight because the kids are having fun and they didn't have the same freedom.
John LennonViolence begets violence, you know. And you can't kill off all the violent people or all the murderers. We'd have to kill off the government.
John LennonLook, 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.
John LennonEverything I've ever done is out. I don't have boxes of unreleased stuff. There's nothing in the files. I can never keep anything unless I don't like the sound of it or it didn't work. If I can sing it to an engineer, I can sing it to anyone.
John LennonHe didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.
John LennonYou're only awake when you realise you're awake and when you're dreaming, it is just as real, whatever happens is just as real - whether you actually do die in a dream or fulfil whatever you're doing in a dream, it's, there's nobody to tell me it isn't as real as this now, because how do you know?
John LennonI just like TV. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.
John LennonI'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.
John LennonNew York is what Paris was in the twenties. . . the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It's the greatest place on earth. . . I've got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash.
John LennonIt's like being possessed: like a psychic or a medium. I felt like a hollow temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another.
John LennonDon't underestimate the importance of happiness. As long as you're happy, who cares what you do?
John LennonI don't intend to be a performing flea any more. I was the dreamweaver, but although I'll be around I don't intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don't want to die at 40.
John LennonTo begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul [McCartney] is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'.
John LennonI 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.
John Lennon