Quotes By Paul McCartney

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.

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

Love is all you need.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My so-called career is a haphazard thing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Think globally, act locally.

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.

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

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

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.

I don't work at being ordinary.

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

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.

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.

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