I’ve always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo.
Why don’t people believe us when we say we’re simply in love?
What does it mean when a person is such a pacifist that they get shot? I can never understand that.
In ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me – a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko.
It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken onstage.
The best things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees; I want money.
How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.
We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now.
As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it’s happening.
I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.
I’m really very embarrassed about my guitar playing, in one way, because it’s very poor. I can never move but I can make a guitar speak.
The reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up.
Well, I just want him to grow up happy. That’s the main thing.
Violence begets violence, you know. And you can’t kill off all the violent people or all the murderers. We’d have to kill off the government.
The idea of beetles came into my head. I decided to spell it BEATles to make it look like beat music, just a joke.
I know I hurt you then But that was way back when.
I’ve had the boyhood thing of being Elvis. Now I want to be with my best friend and my best friend is my wife. Who could ask for anything more?
The first drugs I ever took were at art school, with the group. We all took it together. It was Benzedrine from the inside of an inhaler.
The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.
Elvis died the day he went into the army.