“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.”

“Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”

“I used to think it was mere homesickness, then I started getting it at home.”

“Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it”

“If I were John LennonAnd my feelings for you grew,I'd have left The BeatlesTo spend all my time with you”

“We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it's early Beatles- John Lennon, actually- singing 'I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”

“The sun is up, the sky is blueIt's beautiful, and so are you”

“Fame had kept me from getting laid that night. Fame would make it so other people would bother me, follow me around with cameras, be all up in my shit, keep me from doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Fame could even potentially kill me. It killed a lot of people: John Lennon, Princess Diana, Selena.”

“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.”

“I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.”

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