The Beatles had a tumultuous breakup in 1970, (many still blame Yoko Ono, Lennon’s wife), but Lennon continued to write and perform. Songs like “Instant Karma,” “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and “Woman” showed that Lennon could make music without the other four Beatles. His greatest solo hit, the enduring and hopeful “Imagine,” has been covered by everyone from Lady Gaga to Stevie Wonder. Lennon is widely regarded as a symbol of peace and love, which is a much more simplified version of the man he really was. In addition to his genius musical abilities, sense of humor and yearning for the highest ideals, he cheated on partners, could exhibit violent behavior (which he spoke frankly about on the record and worked to rid himself of), had a fractured relationship with his first son, Julian (whose mom was Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia Powell), and had a big ego. “He could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized. Now since death he’s become ‘Martin Luther’ Lennon,” McCartney once said. “But that wasn’t really him either. He wasn’t some sort of holy saint. He was really a debunker.” Still, when Lennon was shot and killed in New York City on December 8, 1980—by a fan for whom he’d just signed an autograph for hours before—the world lost a tremendous musical talent. Lennon’s influence lives on, not only in his sons Julian and Sean (with Ono)—but in his many fans and the many musicians who came after him. Here are 65 of John Lennon’s quotes about his life, his band and the human condition.
Quotes from John Lennon
- “We’re more popular than Jesus now…. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
- “I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”
- “You’re born in pain. Pain is what we are in most of the time, and I think that the bigger the pain, the more God you look for.”
- “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to be hurt physically, but if they blow the world up… we’re all out of our pain then, forget it, no more problems!”
- “You can’t just keep quiet about anything that’s going on in the world unless you’re a monk. Sorry, monks!”
- “When Paul first sang ‘Hey Jude’ to me–or played me the little tape he’d made of it–I took it very personally. ‘Ah, it’s me!’ I said. ‘It’s me.’ He says, ‘No, it’s me.’ I said, ‘Check, we’re going through the same bit.’ So we all are. Whoever is going through that bit with us is going through it; that’s the groove.”
- “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.”
- “I don’t want to grow up but I’m sick of not growing up… I’ll find a different way of not growing up.”
- “That was a great period. We were like kings of the jungle then, and we were very close to the Stones.… I spent a lot of time with them, and it was great.”
- “I’m not their fing parents… They come to the door with a fing peace symbol and expect to just sort of march around the house or something, like an old Beatles fan. They’re under a delusion of awareness by having long hair, and that’s what I’m sick of. They frighten me.”
- “I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.”
- “I’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.”
- “You don’t have to be a star to get a cheese sandwich. You just have to be first.”
- “I used to be cruel to women, and physically–any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace.”
- “When you’re drowning you don’t think, I would be incredibly pleased if someone would notice I’m drowning and come and rescue me. You just scream.”
- “It looks like I’m going to be 40 and life begins at 40—so they promise. And I believe it, too.”
- “We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.”
- “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."
- “There is no denying that we are still living in the capitalist world. I think that in order to survive and to change the world, you have to take care of yourself first. You have to survive yourself.”
- “The biggest mistake Yoko and I made… was allowing ourselves to become influenced by the male-macho ‘serious revolutionaries,’ and their insane ideas about killing people to save them from capitalism and/or communism (depending on your point of view). We should have stuck to our own way of working for peace: bed-ins, billboards, etc.”
- “We’re not Beatles to each other, you know. It’s a joke to us. If we’re going out the door of the hotel, we say, ‘Right! Beatle John! Beatle George now! Come on, let’s go!’ We don’t put on a false front or anything.”
- “We were four guys… I met Paul, and said, ‘You want to join me band?’ Then George joined and then Ringo joined. We were just a band that made it very, very, big, that’s all. Our best work was never recorded.”
- “That’s why we never improved as musicians; we killed ourselves then to make it.”
- “After Brian [Epstein] died, we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”
- “There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
- “But it’s my music with my band when it’s me singing it, and it’s Paul’s music with his band. Sometimes it’s halvey-halvey, you know. When we write them together, they’re together.”
- “That is one of the main reasons the Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.”
- “I meant it, it’s real; the lyric is as good now as it was then. It’s no different. And it makes me feel secure to know that I was that sensible, or whatever–not sensible, aware of myself… It was just me singing ‘Help’ and I meant it.”
- “I think the music reflects the state that society’s in. It doesn’t suggest the state. I think poets, musicians, artists or whatever they are of the age, not only do they lead that age on but they reflect the age. And I think that’s what the pop music is doing–it’s mainly reflecting.”
- “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.”
- “‘I’m a Loser,’ ‘Help,’ ‘Strawberry Fields,’ they are all personal records. I always wrote about me when I could. I didn’t really enjoy writing third person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things like that. I like first person music. But because of my hang-ups and many other things; I would only now and then specifically write about me.”
- “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world.”
- “We took ‘H’ because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us. But we got out of it.”
- “When you do something beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun, every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”
- “I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody’s noticed. I used to wonder whether I’m a genius or I’m not, which is it? I used to think, well, I can’t be mad, because nobody’s put me away, therefore, I’m a genius. A genius is a form of madness, and we’re all that way, you know, and I used to be a bit coy about it, like my guitar playing.”
- “I was too upset about what [my father had] done to me and to my mother and that he would turn up when I was rich and famous and not bother turning up before. So I wasn’t going to see him at all, but he sort of blackmailed me in the press by saying all this about being a poor man washing dishes while I was living in luxury. I fell for it and saw him and we had some kind of relationship.”
- “I only decided to live here after I’d moved here [to Ameica]. I didn’t leave England with the intention… In America, they should stop saying I do it for the tax. I like it here! Is anywhere better?"
- “My decision was already made on touring, long time ago… you gotta pull a group together, invent a group. And then you gotta whip them into life, make them a real group, and not a bunch of guys. Then you gotta go around all those snotty little dressing rooms—and all you get is money. That’s all you get from a tour: cash.”
- “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?”
- “One of my big things is that I wish to be a fisherman. I know it sounds silly and I’d sooner be rich than poor, and all the rest of that… but I wish the pain was ignorance or bliss or something.”
- “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
- “If she took them apart, can we please give her the credit for all the nice music that George made, and Ringo made, and Paul made, and I’ve made since they broke up?”
- “I couldn’t think of the next few years; it’s abysmal thinking of how many years there are to go, millions of them. I just play it by the week.”
- ”Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.”
- “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that—looking at our scrapbook of madness.”
- “It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”
- “I don’t live it down. I’ve lived it down, played it both ways. Especially when you first get money—you live it up. I had all the biggest cars in the world… and I don’t even like cars. I bought everything that I could buy. The only thing that I never got into is yachts. So, I went through that period. There is nothing else to do once you do it. I just live however makes me most comfortable.”
- “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.”
- “I write songs because that’s the thing I chose to do. And I can’t help writing them, that’s a fact. Sometimes I felt as though you worked to justify your existence, but you don’t; you work to exist, and vice versa, and that’s it, really.”
- “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.”
- “Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.”
- “Just before I record, I go buy a few albums to see what people are doing. Whether they have improved any, or whether anything happened. And nothing’s really happened. There’s a lot of great guitarists and musicians around, but nothing’s happening, you know.”
- “You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!”
- “Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.”
- “If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.”
- “If I can’t have a fight with my best friend, I don’t know who I can have a fight with.”
- “People are afraid of Beatle music. They are still afraid of my songs. Because they got that big image thing: You can’t do a Beatle number… You can’t touch a Lennon song; only Lennon can do it… It’s garbage! Anybody can do anything. A few people in the past have done Beatle songs. But in general they feel you can’t touch them. And there are so many good singles that the Beatles wrote that were never released. Why don’t people do them? It’s good for me; it’s good for Paul. It’s good for all of us.”
- “All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just the Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.”
- “I think Mick [Jagger] got jealous. I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones but he said a lot of tarty things about the Beatles, which I am hurt by. I’d like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every f***king album… he imitates us.”
- “I’ve got used to the fact—just about— that whatever I do is going to be compared to the other Beatles. If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul’s bowling.”
- “Carrying the Beatles or the ‘60s dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy Glenn Miller or the Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It’s not living now. It’s an illusion.”
- “If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the ’60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.”
- “It is a big apartment, and it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have grounds… you know, it’s secure. And people can’t get in and say, ‘I’m Jesus from Toronto,’ and all that. That still happens. Which was happening in the other apartment. You just couldn’t go out the front door, because there would be something weird at the door.”
- “I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.”
- “I could still be forgotten when I’m dead. I don’t really care what happens when I’m dead.” Next, What Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and More Might Have Looked Like Today
