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“The Walrus was Paul!”

John Lennon

"Glass Onion"
Lyrics

“All that business was awful, it was a fuckin' humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent. I didn't know, I didn't foresee. It happened bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand — the people you hated when you were ten.”

John Lennon

Source: As quoted in Rolling Stone (7 January 1971) , and requoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978 ISBN 0094602204

Hate , People , Business

“What's Bagism? It's like… a tag for what we all do, we're all in a bag ya know, and we realised that we came from two bags, I was in this pop bag going round and round in my little clique, and she was in her little avant-garde clique going round and round, and you're in your little tele clique and they're in their…ya know? and we all sort of come out and look at each other every now and then, but we don't communicate. And we all intellectualise about how there is no barrier between art, music, poetry… but we're still all "I'm a rock and roller, he's a poet" … so we just came up with the word so you would ask us what bagism is, and we'd say "WE'RE ALL IN A BAG BABY!"”

John Lennon

Interview on The David Frost Show (14 June 1969) http://web.archive.org/web/20010719003543/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob07.html

Art , Music , Communication , Baby

“What would you suggest I do? Give everything away and walk the streets? The Buddhist says, "Get rid of the possessions of the mind." Walking away from all the money would not accomplish that. It's like the Beatles. I couldn't walk away from the Beatles. That's one possession that's still tagging along, right?”

John Lennon

Playboy interview (1980)

Money

“It's just natural, it's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it like it's The End of The Earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce.”

John Lennon

Interview on Scene And Heard by David Wigg (25 October 1971)

People , Nature

“Everything is as important as everything else.”

John Lennon

On influences, p. 8
The Beatles Anthology (2000)

“I'm not claiming divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can … But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.”

John Lennon

Rolling Stone interview (1980)

Love , Life , Peace , Soul

“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. That meant I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich. So what the hell — if that's a paradox, then I'm a socialist. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about money. That's why I lost it, either by giving it away or by allowing myself to be screwed by so-called managers.”

John Lennon

Playboy interview (1980)

Money , People , Health , Hell

“I was looking for a name like the Crickets that meant two things, and from crickets I got to beetles. And I changed [to] B E A because … B E E T L E S didn't mean two things, so I changed … the E to an A. And it meant two things then. … When you said it, people thought of crawly things; and when you read it, it was beat music.”

John Lennon

Pop Chronicles: Show 27 - The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!: The U.S.A. is invaded by a wave of long-haired English rockers. Part 1 https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19782/m1/#track/4, 24 August 1964 http://www.jpgr.co.uk/pro202.html.

People , Music , Change , Reading

“Well, that's rubbish, you know. Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just barely possible.”

John Lennon

On whether he's under Yoko's spell, under her control
Playboy interview (1980)

“We never made love in a bag. People probably imagined that we were making love. It was just, all of us are in a bag, you know. The point was the outline of the bag, you know, the movement of the bag, how much we see of a person, you know. But, inside, there might be a lot going on. Or maybe nothing's going on.”

John Lennon

Playboy interview (1980)

Love , People , Making love , Imagination

“I've sold my soul to the devil.”

John Lennon

On the commercial success of the Beatles, as quoted in Lennon (1985) by Ray Coleman

Soul

“They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool.”

John Lennon

"Working Class Hero"
Lyrics, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Hate , Fools

“You say you want a Revolution; you better get it on right away.”

John Lennon

"Power to the People"
Lyrics

“I think a label like "avant-garde" defeats itself. You learn to have avant-garde exhibitions. The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats the purpose of avant-garde, because it's already formalised and ritualised.”

John Lennon

Source: The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 301

Thinking , Learning

“If 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 Lennon

Quoted as a 1968 statement of Lennon's in Sunday Tasmanian (29 September 1996), and in The Rough Guide to the Beatles (2003) by Chris Ingham, p. 271, this actually derives from a statement which Lennon perhaps had been quoting:
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
José Ortega y Gasset, in "Art a Thing of No Consequence" in The Dehumanization of Art (1925)
Misattributed

Life , Art

“Mother, you had me, but I never had you.”

John Lennon

"Mother"
Lyrics, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

“You have to be! (Laughs) You might get shot!”

John Lennon

Responding to a reporter question during The Beatles Australian tour of if they were aware of everything going on around them. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=5x5UUQM2Qy4

“For the benefit of Mr. Kite
there will be a show tonight on trampoline.”

John Lennon

"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (1967)
Lyrics

“It makes rock concerts look like tea parties.”

John Lennon

Commenting on American Football, in interview with Howard Cosell on ABC Television (December 1974)

Tea