The Beatles are not merely awful…They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic. William F Buckley, Jr
One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee. It happened bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand – the people you hated when you were ten. John Lennon
You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth. John Lennon
While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures… Paul Johnson
We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. John Lennon
Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry. John Lennon
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. John Lennon
We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship. John Lennon
John [Lennon] and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool’. Paul McCartney