Top 628 Quotes & Sayings by John Lennon - Page 8

In one way, I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things people didn't see. I always saw things in a hallucinatory way.

You can't give a child too much love and if you love somebody, you can't be with them enough. There's no such thing.

We're mostly macrobiotic, but sometimes I take the family out for a pizza.

If you could drink dreams like the Irish streams Then the world would be high as the mountain of morn In the Pool they told us the story How the English divided the land.

Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the wayThat's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything-fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.

Love is a promise; love is a souvenir.

It's no good having, being with people you can dominate all the time. Or being with someone who can dominate you all the time. Because either one is boring.

I can't speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.

Father, you left me, but I never left you.

I'm always proud and pleased when people do my songs. It gives me pleasure that they even attempt them, because a lot of my songs aren't that doable.

I think the music reflects the state that the society is in. It doesn't suggest the state. I think the poets and musicians and artists are of the age - not only do they lead the age on, but they also reflect that age. [...] Like The Beatles. We came out of Liverpool and we reflected our background and we reflected our thoughts in what we sang, and that's all people are doing.

Why should The Beatles give more? Didn't they give everything on God's earth for ten years? Didn't they give themselves?

When I was singing about 'All You Need Is Love' I was talking about something I hadn't experienced.

Come together, right now.

Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?

In Baby You're A Rich Man the point was, stop moaning, you're a rich man and we're all rich, heh heh, baby!

People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine.

I dream in colour, and its always very surreal. My dream world is complete Hieronymus Bosch and Dali. I love it, I look forward to it every night

Before many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.

Wouldn't it be interesting to take Elvis back to his Sun Records period? I don't know. But I'm content to listen to his Sun Records. I don't want to dig him up out of the grave.

Free all the prisoners everywhere, all they want is truth and justice, all they need is love and care.

I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.

And so this is Christmas...what have you done?

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.

I stopped listening to Dylan with both ears after Highway 64 (sic) and Blonde on Blonde, and even then it was because George (Harrison) would sit me down and make me listen.

They want to hold onto something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off to - it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, okay? I don't need it.

Imagine there's no varmints. It isn't hard to do.

When Yoko [Ono] and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters - you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.

I don't want to grow up but I'm sick of not growing up -? that way. I'll find a different way of not growing up. There's a better way of doing it than torturing your body.

Life is what's going on while your making other plans.

It was very romantic. It's all in the song, The Ballad of John and Yoko. If you want to know how it happened, it's in there. Gibraltar was like a little sunny dream. I couldn't find a white suit -? I had sort of off-white corduroy trousers and a white jacket. Yoko had all white on.

Link Wray and Gene Vincent.... two of the greatest unknowns of rock 'n' roll.

"All you need is love." I believe it. It's damn hard, but I absolutely believe it.

I am not the Beatles. I'm me. Paul isn't the Beatles...The Beatles are the Beatles. Separately, they are separate.

Paul (McCartney) and I made a deal when we were 15. There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together that we put both our names on it, no matter what.

I don't know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it... In the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays, there's three of us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all into one album.

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

I just sat all night looking at him, saying, 'Wow, it's incredible.' When Yoko woke up, I told her, 'He's fine,' and we cried.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely.

I'll give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind

I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

That radicalism (of the '70s) was phony, really, because it was out of guilt. I'd always felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it. I don't mean I was a hypocrite. When I believe, I believe right down to the roots.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Music is everybody's possession.

Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.

I'm a freakin' artist, man, not a (expletive) race horse.

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.

I'm really very embarrassed about my guitar playing, in one way, because it's very poor. I can never move but I can make a guitar speak.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. If you were going to give Rock 'n' Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - Rock and Roll or Christianity.

Rituals are important.

We were really professional by the time we got to the States; we had learned the whole game. When we arrived here we knew how to handle the press; the British press were the toughest in the world and we could handle anything. We were all right.

I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.

If somebody gives me a joint, I might smoke it, but I don't go after it.

I didn't come after Elvis and Dylan, I've been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love 'em.

I don't purchase records. I do enjoy listening to things like Japanese folk music or Indian music.

The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.

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

He laid it on George, me and our wives without telling us at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George's, and our dentist at the time. He just put it in our coffee or something. He didn't know what it was, it was just, 'It's all the thing,' with the middle-class London swingers. They had all heard about it and didn't know it was different from pot or pills. And they gave it to us, and he was saying, 'I advise you not to leave,' and we thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house and we didn't want to know.

Nothing really affected me until Elvis.