John Lennon

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

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…

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

Jazz means many things to many people, but it’s all about choices.

It’s not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.