“It just came to me. Everybody was going on about karma, especially in the Sixties. But it occurred to me that karma is instant as well as it influences your past life or your future life.”
On his song "Instant Karma!", prompted by the use of the phrase "Instant Karma" by Melinde Kendall, the wife of Yoko Ono's former husband Tony Cox, as quoted in All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (2000) by David Sheff
Playboy interview (1980)
Context: It just came to me. Everybody was going on about karma, especially in the Sixties. But it occurred to me that karma is instant as well as it influences your past life or your future life. There really is a reaction to what you do now. That's what people ought to be concerned about. Also, I'm fascinated by commercials and promotion as an art form. I enjoy them. So the idea of instant karma was like the idea of instant coffee: presenting something in a new form. I just liked it.
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John Lennon 228
English singer and songwriter 1940–1980Related quotes
Quoted in Christopher Goodwin, "Get real – ageing’s not all Helen Mirren" http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article1466183.ece, Times Online (UK) (4 March 2007)
John Lennon, in "Instant Karma!" (written 27 January 1970)
Lyrics
Nam June Paik, “Cybernated Art,” in Manifestos, Great Bear Pamphlets, (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 24; Quoted in: Edward A. Shanken, " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.artexetra.com//CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf," in: From Energy to Information: Representation in Science, Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford University Press, Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds.), 2002.
1960s