If art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Quoted as a 1968 statement of Lennon's in Sunday Tasmanian (29 September 1996), and in The Rough Guide to the Beatles (2003) by Chris Ingham, p. 271, this actually derives from a statement which Lennon perhaps had been quoting

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. | José Ortega y Gasset, in "Art a Thing of No Consequence" in The Dehumanization of Art (1925)