John Lennon

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

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.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

You blows who you is.

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

I have a sense of the importance of music and how powerful it is to bring people together.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

I’ve had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I’ve had lots of guys call me up. I’ve gotten two or three commissions to write things. I’ve written lots of movie scores.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

The Blues is never old.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

I play as I feel.