I wouldn’t say I was a born writer; I’m a born thinker.
When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.
It’s pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it’s pretty hard to break out of that, to say ‘Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.’
Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.
The second political thing I did was to say ‘The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.’ That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us.
I want you to make love, not war, I know you’ve heard it before.
I remember a time when everybody I loved hated me because I hated them.
I always read the papers, the political bits.
Love means having to say you’re sorry every fifteen minutes.
What we’ve got to do is keep hope alive. Because without it we’ll sink.
I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.
I still believe in peace, love, and understanding.
It’s alright all of us all living saying ‘oh well there’s enough of us so we won’t have anymore, don’t let anybody else live.’ I don’t believe in that.
What I’d have liked would have been the money and the hit records without the fame.
Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people Sharing all the world.
Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
Tell the truth and make it rhyme.
Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.
Happiness is just how you feel when you don’t feel miserable.
We all have Hitler in us, but we also have love and peace. So why not give peace a chance for once?