As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.

It's kind of limiting using your intellect to write songs like Brown Sugar, isn't it? The only thing I'm really interested in is comparative religion and ancient history.

The martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.

By the time we made "Abbey Road", John and I were openly critical of each other's music, and I felt John wasn't much interested in performing anything he hadn't written himself.

The bootleg records, those are outrageous. I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know . . . it's like the phone is tapped and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you taken from underneath your bed and it's got a striptease-type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.

You don't expect music to be brilliant when the films are so bad.