Quotes

I'd rather be a musician than a rock star.

[his last public statement, issued after his death] Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.

[at his induction into the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame] It's a shame Paul [Paul McCartney] can't be here, because he was the one who had the speech in his pocket.

[on his teenage years in Liverpool] You couldn't get a cup of sugar, let alone a rock-and-roll record.

[on the reasons why he became a vegetarian] People are simply screwing up when they go out and buy beefsteak, which is killing them with cancer and heart troubles. The stuff costs a fortune, too. You could feed a thousand people with lentil soup for the cost of half a dozen filets.

It is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite.

[in 1997, about his battle with throat cancer] I got it purely from smoking. Luckily, they found that this nodule was more of a warning than anything else. I'm not going to die on you folks just yet. Life is like a raindrop on a lotus leaf. Everybody realizes that you are either a very lucky person or you're not.

[on how he picked the title for his album "Cloud Nine"] I couldn't really think of, I racked my brain for weeks and months to try and think of a title because I was trying not to have a song title. We had various titles, had hundreds of them, you know, but the next day none of them seemed to work, you know. It was called "Fab" for a bit, but a lot of people liked "Fab" because they get the joke, it was called so many things in the end I just had to have a title, otherwise the album would never have come out. As there were clouds on the cover, we called it "Cloud Nine". I mean, when you look at the cover it could have been called "Spot the Loony!". But I thought, you know, they may not go for that.

[about his song "Got My Mind Set On You"] Ah, it was an old song from about 1959, I think, the writer's name is Rudy Clark. I don't know who he is but it was an excellent song, but the old version I heard of it was a bit antique and doesn't really sound like my version of it, but the song itself had stuck in my head for 20-odd years and just came out on this album ["Cloud Nine"]. But it rocks along, it's quite a good choice.

[on his song "Just for Today"[ It says, "Just for today, don't worry about anything, just try and deal with one thing at a time". Bbasically, it's really for everybody. It's generally a reminder just for today to keep cool and don't try and deal with everything all at once and that kind of thing.

[on his song "Someplace Else"] I did write the song specifically at the request of the producer of the' Madonna' movie and it was the love song for the naughty couple. So I re-cut that song "Someplace Else" and the other song called "Breath Away from Heaven", which is slightly Chinese-sounding. Well, it's supposed to be just slightly Chinese-sounding, I re-grooved that as well from the soundtrack album, from the soundtrack version. So those two were both from Shanghai Surprise (1986).

[about Eric Clapton] I've been friends with Eric for years. And I think I always will be. He's a lovely fella and I love him very dearly. And he, and I just called him up again and you know I'm doing an album ["Cloud Nine"]. "Eric could you come and play?". Sure, he came over and played great stuff. "Devil's Radio", "Cloud Nine", he does a nice little solo on the end of "That's What It Takes" and also the other one on the second side, "The Wreck of the Hesperus.

[on Ringo Starr] Yeah, it's like a built-in thing. If I play a song to Ringo I don't need to say to him, "You know, I want it to go like this"; I just play it and he joins in. He's got a great feel. Ringo's like I sort of don't practice much on the guitar, I sort of pick up and play it when I need to and he's the same. He never practices, he's a very naughty boy. But he just gets his sticks and he just does it and it sounds just like Ringo and he can hold the rock steady all day long.

[on creating the album "Cloud Nine"] I thought, "I'm not going to make one of them, you know, sort of clattery records like everybody else seems to be doing this period. I'm going to make a record like something like I did 20 years ago". Just like a rock n' roll band making a record. We had real saxes and real guitars, real pianos, real drums, real people playing real songs.

[on the process of making his album "Cloud Nine"] I'm at ease with myself, maybe. I'm happy to be making records, by getting away from the music business I was in a good mood to do it, you know, it's just the fun of doing it and just trying to sustain the energy and the interest.

[on life and experience] Experience is the main reason why we're here, I think, in the world to gain experience and from our experience we gain knowledge. Oh, I think so, anyway. Knowledge and if we get any knowledge then we gain liberation, you know, we free ourselves.

[in 1987, about the inspiration for the song "Taxman"] It's not so bad these days, is it? They pay 52% or something. In those days we used to make a pound and give 'em 19 shillings and threepence out of a pound. But it's not quite as bad. But, you know, you have to live where you want to live, really.

I believe I love my guitar more than the others love theirs. For [John Lennon] and [Paul McCartney], songwriting is pretty important and guitar playing is a means to an end.

If we'd know we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.

My first big break was getting in the Beatles. My second big break was getting out of them.

Life goes on within you and without you

The lump was basically a disruption to a cell. I got it purely from smoking. I gave up cigarettes many years ago but had started again for a while and then stopped in 1997. Luckily for me they found that this nodule was more of a warning than anything else. There are many different types of cancerous cells and this was a very basic type.

I'm not going to die on you, folks, just yet. I am very lucky. Sometimes, if you say the word 'cancer' everybody automatically thinks it will end in misery, but it's not always the case. I was very lucky because it didn't go anywhere - all it was was a little red mark on my neck.