“Of all the songs about Sixties self-consciousness and generation-bound identity, none forecasts the lost innocence of an entire generation better [than Bringing It All Back Home]”

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“The Beatles so thoroughly revised our ideas about 'American' music, its style, roots, and tributaries, that it’s hard to imagine how they ever could have remained a British phenomenon.”

from Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music

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“[Paul] is a giant puzzle because he really doesn’t care too much about scholarship and history... he keeps telling stories that people have demonstrated to him repeatedly are not true. But they’re such great stories that you can tell that he kind of believes they are true... he just doesn’t really have a critical vantage on his own life”

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“he was an enigma to himself. He was very mercurial, felt differently on different days, wrote differently on different days. His body of songs comprises really upbeat, earnest, simple things like 'All You Need is Love' and deep dark painful jagged weird obsessive unknowable songs like 'Happiness is a Warm Gun.' The range of that sensibility is really quite extraordinary... he is really deeply fascinating and quite unknowable... He’s really kind of like an American stuck in a British body. He was the most American member of the band”

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“[John] meets Yoko Ono at this art show and he thinks that she is just the grooviest, funniest, spaciest thing he’s ever met. He can’t imagine anyone more spaced out than Yoko Ono. And then he falls for her... [breaking up the Beatles] is kind of a nasty ball and chain that’s going to stick with her. I’m sure they loved each other. I’m convinced that those two were totally hellbent and passionate about their relationship to each other, even when it was troublesome.”

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