“My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.”

“Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.”

“One thing I can tell you is you have to be free. Come together, right now, over me.”

“You know the way people begin to look like their dogs? Well, we’re beginning to look like each other.”

“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”

“…Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I don’t know what will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. We’re more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

“Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way — there’s a chance, and it’s very strange sometimes.”

“When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.”

“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.”

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

“There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”

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

“If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.”

“Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.”

“You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.”

“I never went to high school reunions. My thing is, out of sight, out of mind. That’s my attitude toward life. So I don’t have any romanticism about any part of my past.”

“Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.”

“I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They’re all saying the same thing — and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said — the basic things he laid down about love and goodness — and not what people say he said.”

“All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.”

“Everything is as important as everything else.”

“I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!”

“I don’t believe in yesterday, by the way.”

“What we’ve got to do is keep hope alive. Because without it we’ll sink.”

“Art is only a way of expressing pain.”

“Time wounds all heels.”

“It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.”

“I’ve never really been wanted.”

“I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”

“You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.”

“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.”

“I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.”