"ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive?.....It came in a vision- a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them: 'from this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A’ '"

"From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred 'pop type' music and we preferred what is now called 'underground'. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrast in tastes, I'm sure, did more good than harm, musically speaking, and contributed to our success."

"I'm never conscious of being a Beatle. Never. I'm just me. I'm not famous."

"Not famous forever? Perhaps a new group will come along and take over from us. It would be so nice to be forgotten."

"What I'd like is to be left completely alone. I'm not a mixer. I've got enough friends to see me through. I just want to be left alone."

"I didn't leave the Beatles. The Beatles have left the Beatles, but no one wants to be the one to say the party's over."

"I'm not the Beatles. I'm me. Paul isn't the Beatles...The Beatles are the Beatles. Separately, they are separate."

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war-for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more."

"We all have Hitler in us, but we also have love and peace. So why not give peace a chance for once?"

"We're going to send two acorns for peace to every world leader from John and Yoko. Perhaps if they plant them and watch them grow they may get the idea into their heads"

"I really thought Love would save us all."

"We're no better than anyone else. Nobody is. We're all the same. Everyone's the same inside."

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular that Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were think and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

"I feel higher than the Empire State Building!"-John, after Sean was born

"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it."

"Listen to the color of your dreams."

"Newspaper people have a habit of putting you in the front pages to sell their papers, and then after they've sold their papers and got big circulation's, they say, 'Look at what we've done for you.'"

"The day the fans desert us, I ´ll be wondering how to pay for my whiskey and cokes"

"I am going into an unknown future, but I'm still all here, and still while there's life, there's hope"-John Lennon, Dec 8, 1980

"I'm pleased I made it young. Making it young means that I've now got the rest of my life to do what I really want. It would be terrible to spend your whole life before you finally make it, just to found out it's meaningless. We knew it anyway, but we had to find out for ourselves."

"I don't intend to be a performing flea any more. I was the dream weaver, but although I'll be around I don't intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don't want to die at 40."

"“I want money just to be rich.""

"If someone thinks that love and peace is a clichéé that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal."

"When you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come help me,' you just scream."

"When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed....If there is such a thing as a genius...I am one, and if there isn't, I don't care."

"I don't intend to be a performing flea any more. I was the dreamweaver, but although I'll be around I don't intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don't want to die at 40."

"Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."

"The difference between the Beatles and Elvis was that Elvis died but his manager lived...with us our manager died and the Beatles lived."

"Rock'n'roll will be whatever we make it."

"George himself is no mystery. But the mystery inside of George is immense. It's watching him uncover it all little by little that's so damn interesting."

"Ringo is Ringo; that's all there is to it. And he's every bloody bit as warm, unassuming, funny, and kind as he seems. He was quite simply the heart of the Beatles."

"Don't need a watch to waste your time."
"Don't need a gun to blow your mind."
---From "Whatever Gets You Through the Night"

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

PAUL McCARTNEY

"To me, the Beatles will always be just a great little rock 'n' roll band, nothing more, nothing less. The difference bewteen the Beatles and all the other great rock bands is that the Beatles just happened to make it big."

"There's a lot of random in our songs...writing, thinking, letting others think of bits-then bam, you've the jigsaw puzzle."

"It's great, it sold, it's the bloody Beatles White Album, shut up!"

"At the beginning I was annoyed with [John], jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the breakup of a great musical partnership. It took me a year to realize they were in love."

"I now realize that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache."

"I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know." -(1969)

"We're not learning to be architects, or painters, or writers. We're learning to be. That's all."

"We don't need anybody else to tell us what is real; inside each one of us is love, and we know how it feels."

"I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors concerning my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know."

"All that theatre ever gave me was a sore arse"

"We were always pushing ahead: 'louder, further, more, different.' "

"As Beatles, we've gone through millions of superficial changes, which mean nothing and haven't changed us. In posh places you get to like avocado and spinach, so you have them all the time and when you've done all that you can go back. If you feel like cornflakes for lunch, you ask for them."

GEORGE HARRISON

"The Beatles saved the world from boredom."

"Reaching a godlike state is the most important thing, but I've got a job, being a Beatle."

"There's high, and there's high, and to get really high--I mean so high that you can walk on the water, that high that's where I'm goin'."

"All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much"

"We die and go on to a new life where we try again, to get better all the time. That's life. That's death."

"With our love we could save the world.If they only knew..."

"Try to realize it's all within yourself no one else can make you change, and to see you're only very small and life flows on within you and without you"

"I began to write more songs when I had more time, especially when we began to stop touring. Having Indian things so much in my head it was bound to come out".

"I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, 'You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don't need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it's the very best, and it's the part I give most willingly.'"

"The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them."

"As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead."

"I'm more concerned about the future, but it would take six months of just talking to tell you exactly what I believe in - all the Hindu theories, the Eastern philosophies, and reincarnation."

"The only important thing in life is Karma, that means roughly actions. Every action has a reaction which is equal and opposite."

"I either finish this tour ecstatically happy and want to go on tour everywhere, or I'll end up just going back to my cave for another five years."-- Talking about his North American tour in 1974.

"I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music -- everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music."

"I'm a tidy sort of bloke. I don't like chaos. I kept the records in the record rack, the tea in the tea caddy, and the pot in the pot box."

"LSD isn't a real answer. It doesn't give you anything."

"Playing without Ringo is like driving a car on three wheels."

"It's funny how people behave nicely when there's a stranger in the room."

"I'm really quite simple; I don't want to be in the music business full-time because I'm a gardener. I plant the flowers and watch the river flow."

When Americans threw candy:"It was terrible. They hurt because they don't have soft jelly babies in America, but hard jelly beans like bullets. Some newspaper had dug out the old joke which we'd forgotten about, when John once said I'd eaten all his jelly babies, and everywhere we went, I got them thrown at me."

"Everyone's egos started going crazy. Maybe it was just lack of tact or discretion, but feelings got hurt, and probably the biggest problem of all was that there was no way Yoko Ono or Linda McCartney was ever going to be in the Beatles."

"Having played with other musicians I don't even think The Beatles were that good. It's all a fantasy, this idea of putting The Beatles back together again. The only way it will happen is if we're all broke. Even then I wouldn't relish playing with Paul. He's a fine bass player but sometimes he's overpowering. Ringo's got the best backbeat in the business - I'd join a band with John Lennon any day. But I wouldn't join a band with Paul McCartney. That's not personal; it's from a musician's point of view. Anyway, we're all enjoying being indivuals. We'd all been boxed in for ten years. The biggest break in my career was getting in The Beatles in 1963. The second biggest break since then is getting out of them."

"Eric's been a close friend of mine for years. I would rather (Patti) was with him than with some dope. We both loved Eric and still do. (Seperating) was the best thing for us to do and we should have done it much sooner. But I didn't have the problem with it, Erichad the problem. Every time I'd go see him, he'd really be hung up about it and I was saying, "Fuck it man, don't be apologizing," and he didn't believe me. I was saying, "I don't care."

"All we did for England, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, and all they gave us was a lousy wooden medal with strings through it."

"I've written enough songs now so whatever they say, I'm cool, I know the motive behind writing the song and I don't feel guilty about it all."

RINGO STARR

"Do you remember when everyone began analyzing Beatles songs..I don't think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about"

"I've never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I'm here because it happened. But I didn't do anything to make it happen apart from saying 'Yes'"

"You know I'm not very good at singing because I haven't got a great range. So they write songs for me that are pretty low and not too hard."

"When we were just becoming famous it was nice to go around to see people knowing you, , which is how all famous show-biz people are supposed to do. But it was a drag."

"I think the four of us together, all sort of equal, made us one whole. We're different from each other, yet alike. When you have a single star, or a leader and a backing group, you either take him or leave him. With the four of us, there's more to go on."

"I hope the fans will take up meditation instead of drugs."

"So this is America. They must be out of their minds."

"There's a woman in the United States who predicted the plane we were traveling on would crash. Now, a lot of people would like to think we were scared into saying a prayer. What we did actually--we drank."

"I became a drummer because it's the only thing I could do. But whenever I hear another drummer, I know I'm no good.....I'm not good on the technical things, but I'm good with all the motions, swinging my head, like."

"I'm not going to say anything because nobody believes me when I do."

"It'll be nice to be part of history, some sort of history anyway. What I'd like to be is in school history books and be read by kids."

"I'd like to end up sort of unforgettable."

"When I'm ninety five and it's 'This is Your Life' time, they'll still be referring to me as 'ex-Beatle'...it does have it's advantages. It's still the best way to get a good table at a restaurant."

"He (a captain on a boat Ringo was on) told me all about octopuses, how they go 'round the sea bed and pick up stones and shiny objects and build gardens. I thought, 'How fabulous!' 'cause at the time I just wanted to be under the sea, too. I wanted to get out of it a while."

"Do you remember when everyone began analyzing Beatles songs? I don't think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about."