Paul McCartney Quotations

In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn't weird at all and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.

And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.

I'm a pretty hands-on dad and make the most of my custody. I take care of my little one whenever I can, and she determines what I can do and where I can do it.

I've got to admit it's getting better. It's a little better all the time.

To keep the record straight, it wasn't always John and Yoko. We've all accused one another of various business things; we tend to be pretty paranoid by now, as you can imagine. There's a lot of money involved.

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.

I think I always had a musicality, and I think I could tell a good song from a bad song. And I would appreciate hearing something that was new to me.

I was still 15 when I met John Lennon at a village fete in Woolton, in Liverpool.

At the end of the Beatles, I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then, I really was a kind of cocky sod.

It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard 'Heartbreak Hotel' I thought, this is it.

But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

It's time to end the cruel slaughter of whales and leave these magnificent creatures alone.

I'm often reading a magazine and hearing about someone's new record, and I think : "Oh, boy, that's gonna be better than me". It's a very common thing.

I don't take me seriously. If we get some giggles, I don't mind.

I had this song called Helter Skelter, which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise.

She is the rock 'n' roll queen. Weirdly enough, that is one of the things her reign will be remembered for. Queen Elizabeth I, we remember Raleigh; Queen Elizabeth II it's gonna be the Beatles.

Somewhere down the line everyone must pay for their misdeeds.

Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.

I saw that Meryl Streep said, I just want to do my job well. And really, that's all I'm ever trying to do.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

We were pretty good mates until the Beatles started to split up and Yoko came into it. It was more like old army buddies splitting up on account of wedding bells.

Where I come from, you don't really talk about how much you're earning. Those things are private. My dad never told my mum how much he was earning. I'm certainly not going to tell the world. I'm doing well.

You see, my mother was a district nurse until she died when I was 14, and we used to move from time to time because of her work.

Someone like John would want to end the Beatle period and start the Yoko period. He wouldn't like either to interfere with the other.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

I knew the words to 25 rock songs, so I got in the group. Long Tall Sally and Tutti-Frutti, that got me in. That was my audition.

I love the past. There are parts of the past I hate, of course.

It's also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources.

When you first get money, you buy all these things so no one thinks you're mean, and you spread it around. You get a chauffeur and you find yourself thrown around the back of this car and you think, I was happier when I had my own little car! I could drive myself!

Microphones are just like people, if you shout at them, they get scared.

I hate the idea of success robbing you of your private life.

We were a savage little lot, Liverpool kids, not pacifist or vegetarian or anything. But I feel I've gone beyond that, and that it was immature to be so prejudiced and believe in all the stereotypes.

John's time and effort were, in the main, spent on pretty honorable stuff. As for the other side, well, nobody's perfect, nobody's Jesus. And look what they did to him.

Looking back, I think I was always musical. My dad was very musical, and I think my mom was musical.

I feel that if I said anything about John, I would have to sit here for five days and say it all. Or I don't want to say anything.

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.

Why would I retire? Sit at home and watch TV? No thanks. I'd rather be out playing.

My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.

There are only four people who knew what the Beatles were about anyway.

Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don't always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.

I don't ever try to make a serious social comment.

If children are studying the 20th century, I'm in their text books.

So, if I'm cooking, I'll be steaming vegetables, making some nice salad, that kind of stuff.

I never look forward, because I have no idea about how any of it happened to getting here. I've no idea how the next five years are going to be.

My old school in Liverpool is now a performing-arts school, and I kind of teach there - I use the word lightly - but I go there and talk to students.

George Martin, he's very good at a very sort of lush, sweet arrangement.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

But you know, as a kid I would have thought of a vegetarian as a wimp.

I can't deal with the press; I hate all those Beatles questions.

I never really got on that well with Yoko anyway. Strangely enough, I only started to get to know her after John's death.

I'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.

I'm the worst on facts about me or facts about the Beatles.

Putting two songs together, I've always loved that trick when it works.

George wrote Taxman, and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.

With the Beatles, we'd been very spoiled because we had George Martin who worked for the record label we were going to be signed to. That was very fortunate, because we grew together.

When we were starting off as kids, just the idea of maybe going to do this as a living instead of getting what we thought was going to be a boring job, was exciting.

The Stones also still have a huge following. Mick Jagger leaps around like a crazy dude. And Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts are playing great too.

I used to think that all my Wings stuff was second-rate stuff, but I began to meet younger kids, not kids from my Beatle generation, who would say, We really love this song.

I like the idea that people hear my stuff, and if it's commercially successful, that's a good sign that it's being heard.

I think the pop industry is still a young man's game.

My dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous.

I got my first guitar when I was 15, and I just used to fool about with it, more or less, as time went by, though, I got more interested.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Being in the audience actually looks like quite a lot of fun.

I can take pot or leave it. I got busted in Japan for it. I was nine days without it and there wasn't a hint of withdrawal, nothing.

I look a lot busier than I am, as I'm actually a rather sporadic, random person and I'll play a few gigs and then disappear for a while.

I have not practiced how to be a singer without an instrument.

Having a beard is natural. When you think about it, shaving it off is quite weird.

And when at last I find you/ Your song will fill the air.

If you're using your imagination, you tend to look into the past for ideas.

When I left the Beatles, I made an album called McCartney that I played everything on. And it was kind of a cool experience. I felt like a professor in a laboratory, just crafting stuff and adding this, and putting this on and moving the microphone, and it was very homemade.

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art.

A lot of the Beatles albums were very various, and we did it on purpose: We didn't want the next track to sound like the last one.

I realized marvelling at nature was a deep pleasure of mine.

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.

I don't think of myself as a legend. I just love what I do. I love playing with my band, I love going to beautiful places and give people good music. I love what I do, I`m very lucky man.

That's not really important what religion people are attached to, because by the same argument I have a lot of Christian friends and Moslem friends. It's just happened that I do have a lot of relatives and friends who are Jewish.

It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.

I'm not a great practiser at all. We were never great practisers. The Beatles would come together for about a day before we had a tour, to make sure the amp worked.

It's a powerful thing hearing your friend on a very beautiful song.

My stepmother sold my birth certificate and someone asked why I didn't buy it back. I don't know, really. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It was mine. It cost me nothing and suddenly I had to buy it back.

I think that selling rights is a bad move commercially, not just morally. It cheapens the songs. When people come to my concerts, they often hold up candles when we do "Let It Be." I don't think they'd do that anymore if the song suddenly became part of an Oldsmobile ad.

You're always looking at last year, or 10 years ago, or your school days, or your teenage years, your formative years. Because that's exactly what they are, they're your formative years.

A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.

It's nice to have a little bit of art to fall back on.

I do have a spongelike ear or mentality or whatever you call it, but it's probably a bit subconscious.

Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it's got a certain kind of significance.

The most important ingredient to making a song work is the magic. You've got a melody, you've got words, but on the more successful songs, there's a sort of magic glow that just happens and you can feel it happening. It just makes the songs sort of roll out.

I play to all people, and I play to people not governments, and I believe strongly that all people are peaceful and would want peace.

In some ways we live in a world where things appear to be very logical, very rational, and mechanical aspects of our world are rather scientific and rather straightforward.

I've got a few guitars that I like. The trouble with fame and riches is that you have more than one guitar.

I should be able to look at my accolades and go, "Come on, Paul. That's enough." But there's still this little voice in the back of my brain that goes, "No, no, no. You could do better. This person over here is excelling. Try harder!" It still can be a little bit intimidating.

No matter how accomplished or how many awards you get, you're always still thinking there's somebody out there who's better than you.

So many times, I will have people tell me what I did when I was younger. There's so much being written [about] the early Beatles period, and even pre-Beatles period. And people will say, "Oh, he did that because that, and that happened because of that." And I'll be reading and think, "Well, that didn't happen" and, "That's not why I did that." Like anyone's history, you remember what went down better than people who weren't there.

I am quite happy that the Beatles came and went. There is even a sort of glory in not having it go on forever. There is a complete body of work that went from A to Z and it is all pretty damn good stuff. The one thing I am particularly proud of is that nearly every single bit of it has some good message. I feel fortunate when I look back. Life is not easy, but I've been very lucky - and I'm touching wood as I say that.