•John: See, although Apple turned into the Beatles' baby, Apple was conceived by the Epsteins and NEMS before we took over, before we said: "It's going to be like this". They had it lined up so we would do the same as Northern Songs, sell ourselves to ourselves. And what happened with Northern Songs is we ended up selling Lenmac, or one of them, forever. That's what f***ing Epstein did to us. We lost all our copyrights and Lew Grade's got'em. And the same thing was behind the Apple thing. They were going to set it up, sell eighty-percent to the public, and we were going to be the twenty-percent minority shareholders, with five-percent each, and God knows who else running it. And that was the idea for Apple. But I dunno, it got screwed up somehow (McCabe/Schonfeld p. 102. For the Record).

•Interviewer:Wasn't Apple Paul's idea, basically?...a sort of foundation.
John: Oh, no. No. That was us all talking, just about what we wanted to do. See, initially Clive Epstein came up to us and said, "You've got so much money and we're thinking of investing into retail shops for you".You can just imagine the Beatles with a string of f***in' retail shoe shops-that was the way they thought. They were still on Queens Drive in Liverpool, mentally. Clive Epstein still is,all he wants to do is get back to the hills. So we said, "We don't want to be. Imagine us owning f***ing retail shops". So we said, "We don't want to be in that. At least if we're going to open a shop, let's open something that we'd want, that we'd like to buy". We were thinking, "Let's be the Woolworth of something". Or how great it was to go into Marks and Spencer and get a decent sweater when you were about eighteen. Cheap, but good quality. We wanted Apple to be that. So we were just tripping off, having a joint and saying, "Well, we could have films, and we could help young artists, so they wouldn't have to have the trouble we had with all that tramping round, being undiscovered. So we just built it up. That's what we were going to do. We could have a foundation, and all that, which could have been feasible...We ended up with a clothes shop. I don't know how (McCabe/Schonfeld p. 103-04. For the Record).

General Statements:

•John: "Paul had a nice idea about opening up a white house where we would sell white china and things like that. Everything white you know which was pretty groovy, and it didn't end up like that. It ended up with Apple and all this junk and The Fool and all the stupid clothes and all that" (Wenner).

•John on Apple: "It's more of a trick to see if we can get artistic freedom within a business environment".

•John: It's [Apple] a house we own together, and there's no way of settling it unless we all decide to live in it. It has to be sold.

•After Brian died Apple started to expand into music publishing, signing new artists, sponsoring inventors, and generally putting into practice the principal of making business fun. Business at NEMS wasn't fun at all, so a phone call from John a few days ago was very welcome. "Hello, Alistair. You're looking a bit pissed off at NEMS recently". "I am, really", all the infighting is getting to me". "Well, would you like to come and be General Manager of Apple?" I didn't need a second invitation. I've given my notice to NEMS and I'll transfer to Apple as soon as I can (Taylor, A. p. 108).

•Ritchie York (one time Lennon personal assistant): Well, they'd arrive from Tittenhurst Park and arrive at the office around eleven o'clock in the morning. Then they'd usually just stay for the afternoon and see people they felt were important to the youth movement...It was a real zoo (Giuliano interview fr. Glass Onion p. 276).

•One of the Scruffs was eventually hired by Apple as a receptionist and John paid her a clothing allowance because he liked to see her dressed in all in black or all in white. Another became a tea girls at Apple (Flippo, p. 275).

•Pete Bennett: Paul McCartney hated the strings on Let It Be, and he didn't want Phil Spector producing the album. Paul complained to us, but we put it out anyhow. It wasn't even Klein's doing...We put it out because John Lennon wanted it out. You have to understand that Lennon was Director of Apple Records. Lennon had the last say, and for whatever reason, they made Lennon the president when they set up Apple (Granados, S. Those Were the Days. p. 130).

•Hunter Davies claimed that under Yoko's influence, John started to take charge at Apple. This, in turn, affected Paul's pride and the two were no longer close friends after this (Giuliano, Lost Interviews p. 138).

•Dubbed "Magic" Alex by John, Mardas convinced him that all kinds of fantastical ideas and patents were possible if he were given the financial backing (O'Del, Denis. At the Apple's Core, p. 74).

•Since Apple's inception, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been very interested in launching a budget-line label to issue what would essentially be known three decades later as "audio books". In October 1968, Apple hired Barry Miles, who co-owned the Indica bookshop with John Dunbar and Peter Asher, to manage the proposed spoken-word label. The initial idea of Zapple was that it would release avant-garde and spoken word records at a reduced price that would be comparable to that of a paperback novel. While the idea looked good on paper, the reality was that when the few records actually put out by Zapple finally made it into the shops, they were priced like any other full-priced music album (Granados, S. Those Were the Days. p. 76).

•John commenting on Neil Aspinall: I was the one that protected him many times from Paul. Paul had no love for Neil and vice-versa. And all of a sudden he's a Paul man. Because they clung to Paul-Derek included-because they all thought Paul was the one who was going to hold it all together. So they had a choice of which side to come down on, and they chose Paul, and the past, and I cut'em off. You see they get under the delusion that they are the Beatles. They begin to think that they are the Beatles, that they are the source of power (McCabe/Schonfeld p. 72. For the Record).

•John soon afterwards bought, for a whim and twenty thousand pounds, two small uninhabited islands know together as Dornish off the northwest coast of Ireland. At considerable expense he had the colorful psychedelic horse-drawn wooden Sgt. Pepper wagon shipped to Dornish. It was the only standing structure on either island. John visited the islands once, traveling by helicopter to conduct a job interview with a potential manager of Apple. It was John's idea to hold the interview there. He later gave Dornish to a hippie commune (Flippo, p. 242).

•John: It's a business concerning records, films, and electronics and, as a sideline, manufacturing or whatever. We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don't have to go on their knees in somebody's office, probably yours.

• JG: "How about this new organization, 'Apple'?"
John: "Oh yeah. Well you see, our accountant came up and said, 'We got this amount of money; do you want to give it to the government or do something with it?' So we thought..."
JG: "Which government?"
John: "Oh... Any old government."
John: "So we decided to play businessmen for a bit, because... uhh... we've got to run our own affairs now. So, we've got this thing called 'Apple' which is going to be records, films, and electronics-- which all tie-up. And to make a sort of an umbrella so people who want to make films about... grass... don't have to go on their knees in an office, you know, begging for a break. We'll try and do it like that... That's the idea. We'll find out what happens, but that's what we're trying to do."
Paul: "If you want to do something, normally you've got to go to big business and you've gotta go to the big people, you know."
John: "You don't even get there. Because you can't get through the door 'cuz of the color of your shoes."
Paul: (laughs) "But you know, people are normally... Big companies are so 'big' that if you're 'little and good' it takes you like 60 years to make it. And so people miss out on these little good people. So we're trying to find a few."
JG: "Paul, is that because of your background? You came from a poor background."
Paul: "There's a 'little bit' of that."
John: "It's not sort of..."
JG: "If you didn't feel it as a youngster, you wouldn't feel it now."
Paul: "Yeah that's right, you know. It's just 'cuz, we know what we had to fight to, sort of..."
JG: "Was it tough for you to get started?"
John: "Well, no tougher than anybody else, you see, but George said, 'I'm sick of being told to keep out of the park.' That's what it's about, you know. We're trying to make a park for people to come in and do what they want."
Paul: (comical voice) "Symbolically speaking."
JG: "Is he the spokesman, would you say, John?"
John: "Well, if his spokes are working, he is. And if mine are..."
John: "A policeman."
(The Tonight Show Interview. 1968)

•John: The aim isn't to get a stack of gold teeth in the bank. It's more of a trick to see if we can get artistic freedom within a business structure" (JL Encyclopedia. Harry, p. 750).