When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.

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.

Paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness.

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

That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously because I think our opposition, whoever they may be in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humour.

Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you right on the head.

I've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.

You don't have to be a star to get a cheese sandwich. You just have to be first.

I'm not really a career person; I'm a gardener, basically.

For those of you in the cheap seats I'd like ya to clap your hands to this one; the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry!

We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.

Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it'll always get you the right ones.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

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

When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.

It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken onstage.

I think it's the best thing I've ever done. I think it's realistic, and it's true to the me that has been developing over the years. I like first-person music.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

I'm a freakin' artist, man, not a (expletive) race horse.