Charles Dickens and John Lennon Face the Paparazzi
- Charles Dickens: I have come at last, and it is time I did, to my life here, and intentions for the future. I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair.
- John Lennon: The bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face, the more we were expected to do, until when you didn’t shake hands with the mayor’s wife, she starts abusing you and screaming or saying, “How dare they?” There’s one story where we were asleep after a session, somewhere in America, and this mayor’s wife comes and says, “Get ’em up! I want to meet them.” And our publicist Derek said, “I’m not going to wake them up.” And she starts saying, “You get them up, I’ll tell the press!”
- Dickens: I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station and can’t drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters arrive, all about nothing, and all demanding an immediate answer. This man is offended because I won’t live in his house, and that man is thoroughly disgusted because I won’t go out more than four times in one evening. I have no rest or peace and am in a perpetual worry.
- Lennon: Couldn’t take it. It hurt me so; I would go insane, swearing at them and whatever. It was awful. All that business was awful. It was a fuckin’ humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I did it, but I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee that, it just happened bit by bit till 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.
