On Yoko and Sean

"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'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." 

"If [Sean] doesn't see me a few days or if I'm really, really busy, and I just sort of get a glimpse of him, or if I'm feeling depressed without him even seeing me, he sort of picks up on it. And he starts getting that way. So I can no longer afford to have artistic depressions. If I start wallowing in a depression, he'll start coming down with stuff, so I'm sort of obligated to keep up. And sometimes I can't, because something will make me depressed and sure as hell he'll get a cold or trap his finger in a door or something, and so now I have sort of more reason to stay healthy or bright..." 

"In 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me - a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko." 

"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." 

"People want peace. And you've got to sell it and sell it and sell it. So we do the bed-ins and they say, 'What? They're in bed? What's this?' And all we're doing really is donating our holiday. We get tired and it's ... more convenient for us to stay in one spot than go around doing press conferences." 

"The joy is still there when I see Sean. He didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all his things. But he is my biggest pride." 

"The worst was being separated from Yoko and realizing that I literally could not survive without her." 

"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 fulfillment 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." 

"We realized there's something wrong here, if everybody was upset by the fact that two people were naked." 

"We're all in a bag, you know?... I was in a pop bag, going round and round, in my own little clique. And she [Yoko] was in her own little avant-garde clique, going round and round...So we just came up with the word. If you'd ask us what bagism is, we'd say, 'We're all in a bag, baby." 

"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." 

"We were separated for eighteen months. The Beatles didn't get back together again, did they? So it was not Yoko who kept them apart." 

"When I was cleaning the cat shit and feeding Sean, she [Yoko] was sitting in rooms full of smoke with men in three-piece suits that they couldn't button." 

"When [Yoko and I] got back together, we decided that this is our life. That having a baby was important to us, and that everything else was subsidiary to that, and therefore everything else had to be abandoned. I mean, abandonment gave us the fulfillment we were looking for and the space to breathe." 

"Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?" 

"With us it's 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. I'm supposed to know everything. But she taught me everything I fucking know." 

"Yoko was the only one who didn't put me down through that period, because a) she knew I was suffering, and b) she said, 'You didn't kill anyone. You didn't abuse anyone.' And I thought, Okay, okay, she doesn't mind it, so I'm not going to give a damn whether the reporter likes it or not."