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John Lennon Quotes
About
John
 "It
doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether
I'm a woman or a man." - John Lennon
"I believe in everything until it's
disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists,
even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares
aren't as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the
imagination." - John Lennon
"Am I crazy or am I a genius? I
don't think I'm either." - John Lennon
"I always was a rebel...but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved
and accepted...and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But
I cannot be what I am not." - John Lennon
"I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to
conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all
my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those
people." - John Lennon
"My defenses were so great. The
cocky rock and roll hero who knows all
the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn't know how to cry.
Simple." - John Lennon
"If being an egomaniac means I
believe in what I do and in my art or my music, then in that respect you
can call me that...I believe in what I do, and I'll say it." -
John Lennon
"Nothing 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 Lennon
"Nobody controls me. I'm
uncontrollable. The only one who can control me is me, and that's just
barely possible. And that's the lesson I'm learning. If someone's going
to impress me, whether it be a Maharishi or a Yoko, then there comes a
point where the emperor has no clothes 'cause I'm naive, but I'm not
stupid. For all you folks out there who think I'm having the wool pulled
over my eyes, well, that's an insult to me. But if you think you know
me, or you have some part of me because of the music, and then you think
I'm being controlled like a dog on a leash because I do things with her,
then screw you, brother or sister, you don't know what's happening. I'm
not here for you, I'm here for me and her, and now the baby" -
John Lennon
"I 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 Lennon
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 Love
and Life
"Life is what happens to you when
you are busy making other plans" - John Lennon (Beautiful
Boy)
"Living is easy with your eyes
closed..." - John Lennon
"Love is the flower you've got to
let it grow." - John Lennon
"Love is the answer and you know
that for sure". - John Lennon
"We've got this gift of love, but
love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in
the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to
keep on watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture
it." - John Lennon
"We realized there's something
wrong here, if everybody was upset by the fact that two people were
naked." - John Lennon
"Christianity will go. It will
vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and will be
proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will
go first - rock and roll or Christianity." - John Lennon
"Possession isn't nine-tenths of
the law its nine-tenths of the problem." - John Lennon
"If everyone demanded peace instead
of another television set, then there'd be peace." - John Lennon
"Everything positive is nice, I like it. Just the effect it had on
people was good, I think." - John Lennon
"People want peace. And you've got
do sell it and sell it and sell it. So we do the bed-ins and they say,
'What? They're in bed? What's this?' And all we're doing really is
donating our holiday. We get tired and it's...more convenient for us to
stay in one spot than go around doing press conferences." - John
Lennon
"Well, crying for it wasn't enough. The thing the sixties did was
show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It
wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." -
John Lennon
"We've been on our peace gig, as we call it, for a year solid. And
people say, 'Do you think it's having any effect?' I can't answer that.
It's like asking me in the Cavern, 'Are you gonna make it?' In the back
of my mind I thought, I'm gonna make it, but I couldn't lay it on the
line. And I think that peace is more tangible than Beatles." -
John Lennon
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About
the Beatles
 "When
I was a Beatle I thought we were the best fucking group in the goddamn
world, and believing that is what made us what we were." - John
Lennon
"It was like being in the eye of a
hurricane. You'd wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get
here?" - John Lennon
"The idea of being a rock and roll musician sort of suited my
talents and mentality. The freedom was great, but then I found out I
wasn't free. I'd got boxed in...The whole Beatle thing is just beyond
comprehension ... subconsciously I was crying for help." - John
Lennon
"I'm not saying we're better or
greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a
thing, or whatever it is. I just said what I said, and it was wrong, or
it was taken wrong. And now it's all this." - John Lennon
"The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the
Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature,
more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We
knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote
together as teenagers and in our older twenties." - John Lennon
"We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship
going to discover the New World . And the Beatles were in the crow's
nest of that ship ... We were part of it and contributed what we
contributed. I can't designate what we did and didn't do. It depends on
how each individual was impressed by the Beatles or how our shock wave
went to different people. We were going through the changes, and all we
were saying was, it's raining up here, or there's land or there's a sun
or we can see a seagull. We were just reporting what was happening to
us." - John Lennon
"Anybody who knows our history
knows that we went through all hell together - through miscarriages and
terrible times." - John Lennon
"If The Beatles or the 60's had a
message, it was 'Learn to swim. And once you've learned - swim!" -
John Lennon
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 The
Music
"Songwriting 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 to sleep. It's always in the middle
of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical
faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is.
Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on
the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp
them..." - John Lennon
"Everything 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 Lennon
"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. Songwriting is a limiting experience in some ways -
writing down words that have to rhyme." - John Lennon
"For a long time I wasn't listening
to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would
cause me to get sweaty--it would bring back memories I didn't want to
know about, or I would get that feeling that I'm not alive 'cause I'm
not making it. And if it was good, I hated it 'cause I wasn't doing it.
And if it was bad, I was furious 'cause I could've done it
better..." - John Lennon
"The first year I had this sort of feeling in the back of my mind
that I ought to [be doing music]. And I'd go through periods of panic,
because I was not in Billboard or being seen at Studio 54 with Mick and
Bianca. I mean, I didn't exist anymore. It would become like a paranoia,
and then it would go away, because I'd be involved with the baby. And I
realized there was a life without it - life after death." - John
Lennon
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Yoko and
Family
 "Rituals
are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married. I'm not interested
in being hip." - John Lennon
"I'd never met a woman I considered
as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman I met was
either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of
course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people
anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who
would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and
that was it." - John Lennon
"I was too scared to break away
from the Beatles, which I'd been looking to do since we stopped touring.
And so I was sort of vaguely looking for somewhere to go but didn't have
the nerve to really step out into the boat myself, so I sort of hung
around, and when I met Yoko and fell in love, my God, this is different
than anything before. This is more than a hit record. It's more than
gold. It's more than everything...When I met Yoko is when you meet your
first woman, and you leave the guys at the bar, and you don't go play
football anymore. Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest
whatsoever, other than they were like old school friends." -
John Lennon
"I've always thought there was this
underlying thing in Paul's 'Get Back.' When we were in the studio
recording it, every time he sang the line 'Get back to where you once
belonged," he'd look at Yoko." - John Lennon
"In 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' I was visualizing Alice in
Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me - a girl
with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy
turned out to be Yoko." - John Lennon
"With us it's a teacher - pupil relationship. That's what people
don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous
one. I'm supposed to know everything. But she taught me everything I
fucking know." - John Lennon
"We've broken down a few barriers between us, which we had to do
because we had two big egos, two individual artists - and with love we
overcame that." - John Lennon
"Before Yoko and I met, we were
half a person. You know there's an old myth about people being half and
the other half being in the sky, or in heaven or on the other side of
the universe or a mirror image. But we are two halves, and together
we're a whole." - John Lennon
"We're all in a bag, you know?...I
was in a pop bag, going round and round, in my own little clique. And
she [Yoko] was in her own little avant-guarde clique, going round and
round...So we just came up with the word. If you'd ask us what bagism
is, we'd say, 'We're all in a bag, baby." - John Lennon
"We haven't been apart for more
than one hour in two years. Everything we do is together, and that's
what gives us our strength." - John Lennon
"Yoko was the only one who didn't
put me down through that period, because a) she knew I was suffering,
and b) she said, 'You didn't kill anyone. You didn't abuse anyone.' And
I thought, Okay, okay, she doesn't mind it, so I'm not going to give a
damn whether the reporter likes it or not." - John Lennon
"The worst was being separated from Yoko and realizing that I
literally could not survive without her." - John Lennon
"We were separated for eighteen months. The Beatles didn't get back
together again, did they? So it was not Yoko who kept them apart." -
John Lennon
"When [Yoko and I] got back together, we decided that this is our
life. That having a baby was important to us, and that everything else
was subsidiary to that, and therefore everything else had to be
abandoned. I mean, abandonment gave us the fulfillment we were looking
for and the space to breathe." - John Lennon
"Why don't people believe us when
we say we're simply in love?" - John Lennon
"When I was cleaning the cat shit
and feeding Sean, she [Yoko] was sitting in rooms full of smoke with men
in three-piece suits that they couldn't button." - John Lennon
"We are both sensitive people and we were hurt a lot by it. I mean,
we couldn't understand it. When you're in love, when somebody says
something like, 'How can you be with that woman?' you say, 'What do you
mean? I am with this goddess of love, the fulfillment of my whole life.
Why are you saying this? Why do you want to throw a rock at her or
punish me for being in love with her?' Our love helped us survive it,
but some of it was pretty violent. There were a few times when we nearly
went under, but we managed to survive it and here we are. [Looks upward]
Thank you, thank you, thank you." - John Lennon
"You can't cheat kids. If you cheat
them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or
seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called
teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to
stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time.
You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you." -
John Lennon
"The joy is still there when I see
Sean. He 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 his things. But he is my biggest pride." - John Lennon
"The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on
earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's
mental and physical health is a responsibility which most of us,
including me, avoid most of the time, because it's too hard...To put it
loosely, the reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the
responsibility of bringing them up..." - John Lennon
"If [Sean] doesn't see me a few
days or if I'm really, really busy, and I just sort of get a glimpse of
him, or if I'm feeling depressed without him even seeing me, he sort of
picks up on it. And he starts getting that way. So I can no longer
afford to have artistic depressions. If I start wallowing in a
depression, he'll start coming down with stuff, so I'm sort of obligated
to keep up. And sometimes I can't, because something will make me
depressed and sure as hell he'll get a cold or trap his finger in a door
or something, and so now I have sort of more reason to stay healthy or
bright..." - John Lennon
"I'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 Lennon
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