Some John Lennon quotes to mark the 25th anniversary of his death - from mirror.co.uk:
ON PAUL McCARTNEY
WE got fed up of being sidemen for Paul. Paul took over and supposedly led us. What’s leading us when you wander around in circles?
IN the studio, every time he sang the line ‘Get back to where you once belonged’ he’d look at Yoko.
HE is an egomaniac.
ON ELVIS PRESLEY
“ELVIS really died the day he joined the army. That’s when they killed him and the rest was a living death.”
ON THE SIXTIES
“IF someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.”
ON RELIGION
“CHRISTIANITY will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first - rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
ON YOKO ONO
I’D never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman Imet was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. I always had this dream of meeting an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.
I HOPE we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that - looking at our scrapbook of madness.
ON HIS LOST WEEKEND
“WHEN you’re 35, you can’t take as much booze… and I always got a little violent on drink.”
ON DEATH
“I’M not afraid of dying. I’m prepared for death because I don’t believe in it. I think it’s just getting out of one car and getting into another.”
ON AWARD OF AN MBE
“LOTS of people who complained about us getting the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war. They got them for killing people. We deserved ours for not killing people.”
ON THE BEATLES’ DECISION TO QUIT TOURING
“THE music wasn’t being heard. It was just a sort of freak show. The Beatles were the show and the music had nothing to do with it. 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?’”
ON ROLLING STONES
“EVERY f****** thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. I think it’s a joke.”
“In the 80s, they’ll be asking, ‘Why are those guys still together?’ They will be showing pictures of the guy with lip-stick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black make-up on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That’s gonna be the joke.”
ON THE BEATLES SPLIT
“I’D come to a point where it was no longer creating magic.”
ON THE LEGACY
“WHEN I was a Beatle, I thought we were the best f****** group in the goddamned world. But you play me those tracks today and I want to remake every damn one of them. There’s not a single one. I heard Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds on the radio last night. It’s abysmal, you know. The track is just terrible. But that’s the artistic trip, isn’t it? That’s why you keep going.”
ON HARRISON
“HE was working with two brilliant songwriters and he learnt a lot from us. I wouldn’t have minded being George, the invisible man, and learning what he learned.”
ON RINGO
“BEST drummer in the world? He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.”
ON SGT PEPPER
“I SUPPOSE we could have worked harder on it, but I couldn’t be arsed doing any more.”
ONE-LINERS
“AS usual, there’s a great woman behind every idiot.”
“EVERYTHING is clearer when you’re in love.”
“IF everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
“REALITY leaves a lot to the imagination.”
“POSSESSION isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.”
“TIME you enjoy wasting was not wasted.”