John Lennon

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being’s mental and physical health is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time, because it’s too hard…To put it loosely, the reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up…

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…

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

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

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do… play for the walls?

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

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

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it’s disposable.