Quotes

"I never saw them have a row" -Kenny Lynch

"We were just very simpatico to each other" -Olivia

"I fell for her immediately. I told her that I didn't want her doing all that typing" -George

"She's been a very calming influence on me. We're blissfully happy" -George

"First and foremost I am a wife and mother" -Olivia

"Probably because George and I both come from working class backgrounds, our values, our beliefs, are the same" -Olivia (on the success of her marriage)

"He was a person that I had a great connection with. He also had a great sense of humor. And he was very serious and he aspired to a higher kind of consciousness, a higher life." -Olivia

"You know, it was really nature that he loved and I think he felt closest to God in nature." -Olivia

"You know, George dedicated a lot of his life to attain a good ending, and I don't have any doubt that he was successful" -Olivia

"George gave his life to God a long time ago. He wasn't trying to hang on to anything, he had come to terms with it" -Olivia

"I miss George very much, he was a person I had a great connection with" -Olivia

"George always had time for people, and he used to make fun of the fact he was a Beatle" -Olivia

"The world is a much sadder place for suffering the loss of such a beautiful man" -Olivia

"This is a gathering of George's close friends and family, so it's always going to be emotional. This concert pays tribute to someone we all loved. I think he'd enjoy it" -Olivia, October 8, 2003, at the premiere of 'Concert for George' Los Angeles, California premiere

"You know, recognizing George at his beginning of his career and then winning a Grammy for his last album, it just has been a pretty good night" -Olivia, February 8, 2004, after the Grammy Awards

"George aspired to leave his body in a conscious manner and that was a goal of his life, you know. That is the whole point of meditation, the whole point of spiritual practice" -Olivia

"Fine is OK, but it is not really good enough, is it? But George was right, I am fine and I am OK, although I will miss him until my dying day. But he walked his road and now I have to walk mine." -Olivia

There is no way of going around grief, I think it's better to just go right through it. In fact, I probably torture myself a bit because I love listening to his voice, I love watching our home movies, I love listening to his music and reading about him. For half of my life, I heard his voice every day, so to not hear it is very strange." -Olivia

"He was so generous and open, so much more patient with people than me. He took everybody along with him, like a driftnet fisherman. If we were going on holiday, everybody would come. If we were having dinner, everybody was welcome. He was Pisces, so he swam in a school." -Olivia

"Well, I just gave him a good chance to have a nice home life and a son. If he said I calmed him down, then I probably did calm him down. I used to tell him to cheer down, not cheer up." -Olivia

"I don't know if anyone really knows the secret of such a long marriage like ours, but we both had a bigger goal of attaining a spiritual success and I think that could be it. When you have a bigger goal in life, it makes everything else a little bit easier." -Olivia

"I always separated George the artist from George the person." -Olivia

"Cynthia has just written a book about John. That's fine, I just want to appear where I have to. I don't need to say anything about George to present him or preserve him because that's not what he would have wanted. I'm just trying to finish what he started." -Olivia (Cynthia Lennon had written that George had an affair with Maureen Starkey, ex-wife of Ringo Starr)

"He wanted to share the things he loved so much. Who got it, got it, and who didn't, didn't." -Olivia

"He always had things going on like this. That's why he was such a fun guy." -Olivia

"Well, I think they were so young, and George, he always said that he was always like the adult in the room. And, you know, you look now, and there wasn't that much age difference. But, you know, they were just four scruffy guys. But he enable them to manifest their music for what they heard in their heads." -Olivia on George Martin

"When I heard about it, I sent George a fax, and it just said, “Aren’t you glad you married a Mexican girl?” Olivia really kicked ass. She is a beautiful person." -Tom Petty (after hearing the news about George's 1999 stabbing)

"Olivia had the hardest job in the world, because she loved George more than all of us, and she really took care of him and cleared the path in front of him, behind him, and inherited that crazy life, you know." -Tom Petty

"George had a really curious mind, and when he got into something he wanted to know everything." -Olivia

"If you had something like two million people screaming at you, I think it would take a long time to stop hearing that in your head. George was not suited to it." -Olivia

"George talked a lot about his nervous system, that he just didn't want to hear loud noise anymore. He didn't want to be startled. He didn't want to be stressed." -Olivia

"He didn't want to have any obligations. He kept writing and recording songs in his home studio, but turned down offers to appear on award shows, or to do almost anything." -Olivia

Book Extracts

"I'd met George for the first time the previous year in Los Angeles. He had flown us both in his private jet to Las Vegas to see "O", an amazing theatrical performance involving underwater scenes by the Cirque du Soleil. We had a ball that weekend. Olivia, George's wife, was a very beautiful woman. She also projected amazing mental strength. It was no surprise to me that she had sorted out the guy who stabbed George and had saved his life. Olivia and I got on really well. In fact, we bonded straightaway in the ladies' toilets where she got her skirt zip stuck and I had to rescue her! They were a really loving couple. George was warm and sweet and they were both devoted to their only son, Dhani, who was away at college and whom they talked about all the time."

-Heather Mills McCartney from her book, A Single Step.

"I know he was hurt and angry that I left him, but not long afterward, he met Olivia Arias, and from then on, things were easier all round...She worked for Dark Horse, his record label in Los Angeles, and I liked her, but I was hurt when they married in 1977* because George didn't tell me. I said nothing to Eric but he knew instinctively that it had upset me, and wrote a song about it- "Golden Ring", on the Backless album. When I went back to Friar Park, sometime later, when Dhani, their son, was about six, I was interested to see that the house was as I had left it. George asked how I felt coming back to my old home. He hoped I wasn't uncomfortable...[1999 stabbing] George and Olivia had gone to bed and in the middle of the night, George had heard glass breaking. He woke Olivia and told her he was going to investigate. She tried to stop him but he insisted. The man had smashed a window and come up the stairs with a knife in his hand. George met him in the minstrel's gallery and there was a fight. Then Olivia appeared, picking up a lamp, and hit the man over the head. George had been stabbed in the chest. Eventually the police arrived and grabbed the intruder. He was a schizophrenic in his thirties with a thing about the Beatles. It was horribly reminiscent of what had happened to John Lennon"

-Pattie Boyd from her book "Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me"

“He seemed so happy in those days, especially when he was with Olivia. I was surprised to see how affectionate he was with Olivia, holding hands, heads touching as they talked, snuggling up next to her at every opportunity…I liked Olivia, but she had two insurmountable disadvantages. She wasn’t Pattie. That was the big one. But I was also jealous of George’s attention to her…But Olivia was his new love, and he was clearly heads over heels, spending all his spare time with her and creating a little invisible wall that separated them from the rest of us.”

–Chris O’Dell from her book “Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved”