“As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.”
“It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me.”
“Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.”
“It takes time to get rid of all this garbage that I’ve been carrying around that was influencing the way I thought and the way I lived. It had a lot to do with Yoko, showing me that I was still possessed. I left physically when I fell in love with Yoko, but mentally it took the last ten years of struggling. I learned everything from her. … It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That’s what people don’t understand. She’s the teacher and I’m the pupil. I’m the famous one, the one who’s supposed to know everything, but she’s my teacher. She’s taught me everything I f*cking know.”
“They despised her (Yoko)… It seemed I had to be happily married to them or Yoko, and I chose Yoko. George insulted her right to her face and I didn’t hit him, I don’t know why. Ringo was alright but the other two really gave it to us. I’ll never forgive ‘em.”
“She forced me to become avant-garde and take my clothes off, when all I wanted was to become Tom Jones.”
“We are both sensitive people and we were hurt a lot by it. I mean, we couldn’t understand it. When you’re in love, when somebody says something like, ‘How can you be with that woman?’ you say, ‘What do you mean? I am with this goddess of love, the fulfilment of my whole life. Why are you saying this? Why do you want to throw a rock at her or punish me for being in love with her?’ Our love helped us survive it, but some of it was pretty violent. There were a few times when we nearly went under, but we managed to survive it and here we are. [John looks up] Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“We haven’t been apart for more than one hour in two years. Everything we do is together, and that’s what gives us our strength.”
“She’s brought out the real me. And I get nervous and tense like anybody else but I’m more relaxed than I ever was, since I was a child, you know.”
“Anybody who knows our history knows that we went through all hell together - through miscarriages and terrible times.”
“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.”
“We’ve broken down a few barriers between us, which we had to do because we had two big egos. Two individual artists - and with love we overcame that.”
“When somebody is angry with us, we draw a halo around his or her head, in our minds. Does the person stop being angry then? Well, we don’t know! We know, though, that when we draw a halo around a person, suddenly the person starts to look like an angel to us.”
“Before Yoko and I met, we were half a person. You know there’s an old myth about people being half and the other half being in the sky, or in heaven or on the other side of the universe or a mirror image. But we are two halves, and together we’re a whole.”
“I was too scared to break away from the Beatles, which I’d been looking to do since we stopped touring. And so I was sort of vaguely looking for somewhere to go but didn’t have the nerve to really step out into the boat myself, so I sort of hung around, and when I met Yoko and fell in love, my God, this is different than anything before. This is more than a hit record. It’s more than gold. It’s more than everything… When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman, and you leave the guys at the bar, and you don’t go play football anymore. Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old school friends.”
“John and Yoko are like the wind. You can’t see it, but when it passes the trees bend. You know, and that’s what we do.”
“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 humor. You know, and we are humorous, we are, what are they, Laurel and Hardy. That’s John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot.”
“We never made love in a bag. People probably imagined that we were making love. It was just, all of us are in a bag, you know. The point was the outline of the bag, you know, the movement of the bag, how much we see of a person, you know. But, inside, there might be a lot going on. Or maybe nothing’s going on.”
“They want to hold onto something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can’t see why I’m with Yoko. And if they can’t see that, they don’t see anything. They’re just j*cking off to - it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go j*ck off to Mick Jagger, okay? I don’t need it.”
“Yoko looks upon men as assistants… . Of varying degrees of intimacy, but basically assistants. And this one’s going to take a pee.” (Exits to the restrooms)
“I’ve had the boyhood thing of being Elvis. Now I want to be with my best friend, and my best friend’s my wife. Who could ask for anything more?”
“I’d like to live to a ripe old age, with Yoko only, you know. And I’m not afraid of dying. I don’t know how it’d feel at the moment. But I’m prepared for death because I don’t believe in it. I think it’s just getting out of one car and getting into another.”
“You can’t plan in life – you just have to do the best with what life gives you. John taught me to laugh a lot at life, and I do. It would have been better if he hadn’t died but you can’t sit and cry. These are things life throws at you and you have to learn to overcome them. You have to try to make good from bad.”
Yoko Ono
I believe I'm like the sun. With every sunset, is a sunrise waiting to happen.
The Beatles' little darling.
