“...the Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia--a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys--they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles--not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.”

“...it was not simply a matter of musical taste; whether you preferred the Beatles or [the Rolling] Stones said much about your personality and character. People who were happy, intelligent, well-adjusted, popular, clean, decent and punctual tended to be Beatles fans. Those who were evil, cretinous, scabby, drug-ridden, filthy, criminal perverts liked the Stones.As for your author, I personally take no side in the controversy, remaining strictly neutral.”

“I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them.""What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?"Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself."At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.”

“They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.”

“Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.”

“So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.”