Paul McCartney Quotes

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.

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

It was a period when they used to read into our lyrics a lot, used to think there was more in them than there was.

I do like Eddie Van Halen as a player. He gets it right quite often.

I am a vegetarian because I realized that even little chickens suffer pain and fear, experience a range of feelings and emotions, and are as intelligent as mammals, including dogs, cats, and even some primates.

Love is all you need.

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.

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.

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

I feel like the sixties is about to happen. It feels like a period in the future to me, rather than a period in the past.

My mum died when I was 14. That is a kind of strange age to lose a mother. John lost his mum when he was 17.

I think the minute you're full up and have had enough to eat, then that's time to retire.

I just always enjoy it; if you really enjoy what you do, you don't want to stop.

At the office where the paper grows, she takes a break, drinks another coffee, and she finds it hard to stay awake. It's just another day.

It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.

If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.

Somewhere down the line everyone must pay for their misdeeds.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds actually wasn't meant to say LSD It was a drawing that John's son brought home from school Lucy was a kid in his school.

I'm singing 'English Tea' from my new album 'Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.' I have a cup of tea in the morning, so it's something good to wake up to.

Paul: 'After recording sessions, at two or three in the morning, we'd be careering through the villages on the way to Weybridge, shouting 'weyhey' and driving much too fast. George would perhaps be in his Ferrari - he was quite a fast driver - and John and I would be following in his big Rolls Royce or the Princess. John had a mike in the Rolls with a loudspeaker outside and he'd be shouting to George in the front: 'It is foolish to resist, it is foolish to resist! Pull over!' It was insane. All the lights would go on in the houses as we went past - it must have freaked everybody out.

When John went to make 'How I Won the War' in Spain, he took the same car, which he virtually lived in. It had blacked-out windows and you could never see who was in it, so it was perfect. John didn't come out of it - he just used to talk to the people outside through the microphone: 'Get away from the car! Get away!

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.

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

I go back so far I'm in front of me.

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.

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 think the idea of getting out of a traffic jam and getting out of work each week and going and doing all this stuff would be really exhausting.

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.

When you get the money, you still need to keep going; you don't stop. There has to be something else. I think it's the freedom to do what you want and to live your dreams.

The ring at the end of my nose makes me look rather pretty.

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

I feel like I'm running in a figure of eight, don't know if I'm coming or going, early or late.

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

You can fill my appetite without me taking up a bite.

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.

My arrest was on every bloody TV set. The other prisoners all knew who I was and asked me to sing.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs

When you got a job to do, you got to do it well. You gotta give the other fellow hell.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

I did cocaine for about a year around the time of Sgt Pepper. Coke and maybe some grass to balance it out. I was never completely crazy with cocaine. I'd been introduced to it and at first it seemed OK, like anything that's new and stimulating. When you start working your way through it, you start thinking: 'Mmm, this is not so cool an idea,' especially when you start getting those terrible comedowns.

I think [Transcendental Meditation] is what people need. They don't need high minded talk, they need results.

I believe that in the future meditation could be as commonplace in schools and society as eco-awareness is now. It interests me that an ancient cure may be the solution to a modern problem.

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

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.

Going to do it to you sweet banana, like it's never been done, and we'll get high, high, high, in the mid-day sun.

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

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

I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics.

When I write, there are times
not always
when I hear John (Lennon) in my head, ... I'll think, OK, what would we have done here?, and I can hear him gripe or approve.

It comes in handy in situations like that. People always expect you to be riding around in stretch limousines all the time, but I will sometimes take public transportation if it's convenient, and it does surprise people, you see the heads turn.

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.

Transcendental Meditation gives me an island of calm
in the midst of so much turbulence.

I don't work at being ordinary.

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

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.

People think once you get famous and rich you move out of the public sphere and you have nothing left to write about. I've heard that - Bruce Springsteen was this real street boy, now he's got this big house. How does that compute? If you don't look at the material side of someone's life, if you look at more the emotional side, there's always a wealth of stuff to write about.

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

Every love song I write is for Linda.

You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.

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.

There is good and bad in everyone.

When we were kids growing up in Liverpool, all we ever wanted to be was Elvis Presley.

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

I like most kinds of music. So I haven't got a bag, as they say ... except the big black one in the hall outside.

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 a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.

All at once we see things in our skies, and we both realize it together. Well you know they were wrong, get on the right thing.

Alas, it looks like those unsubstantiated rumours about me are about to come true after all this time ...

If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian [Epstein].

Everybody's talking about the President, we all chipped in for a bag of cement.

I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.

If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.

There will be an answer. Let it be.

By the time we made "Abbey Road", John and I were openly critical of each other's music, and I felt John wasn't much interested in performing anything he hadn't written himself.

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

It was bad on Linda. She had to deal with this guy who didn't want to get out of bed and, if he did, wanted to go back to bed pretty soon after. He wanted to drink earlier and earlier each day and didn't really see the point in shaving. I was generally pretty morbid.

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.

Most people don't know that I invented the selfie.

Hamburg totally wrecked us. I remember getting home to England and my dad thought I was half-dead. I looked like a skeleton, I hadn't noticed the change, I'd been having such a ball!

Animation is not just for children - it's also for adults who take drugs.

And what's the point of changing when I'm happy as I am?

This is the first time I've ever played the Grammys. I finally passed the audition.

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

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

I was impossible. I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, an unemployed worker.

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.

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

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

I don't know anything about the Appalachian mountains or cowboys and Indians or anything. I just made it up.

The interesting thing about the Beatles was: The music was one thing, but we kind of symbolized a certain kind of freedom at a time when people of our generation were just growing up and just becoming adults.

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

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

I guess the ultimate luxury professionally is to be able to change your direction, to work in another medium.

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

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.

My brother's researched our early family history. He found a letter from a fella who said he used to be in love with my mum.

And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make.

Lady Madonna lying on the bed
Listen to the music playing in your head.