Nothing is real.
It just was a gradual development over the years. I mean last year was ‘all you need is Love.’ This year, it’s ‘all you need is Love and peace, baby.’ Give peace a chance, and remember Love. The only hope for us is peace. Violence begets violence. You can have peace as soon as you like if we all pull together. You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you’ll get it as soon as you like.
I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…
And so this is Xmas for black and for white, for yellow and red, let’s stop all the fight.
We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.
Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.
That man is idle who can do something better.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.
If you develop rules, never have more than ten.
You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.
What is once well done is done forever.
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
Pity is for living, envy is for dead.
