Paul McCartney Quotations | Page 3

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.

The long and winding road that leads to your door / Will never disappear, / I've seen that road before it always leads me here, / Leads me to your door.

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.

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.

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

And when the night is cloudy There is still a light that shines on me Shine on until tomorrow, let it Be ...

Home in her apartment she'd dwell 'til the man from her dreams comes to break the spell.

Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

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.

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.

Ringo (Starr) isn't even the best drummer in The Beatles

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs

Love is a robber and he lives within your eyes.

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

Think globally, act locally.

Be cool and you'll be alright. That's rock & roll religion.

Some people don't believe in climate warning - like those who don't believe there was a Holocaust.

Long live all us crazy soldiers Who were born under calico skies May we never be called to handle All the weapons of war we despise

There was one moment where they were riding their little ponies in Scotland, and Stella said to me: 'Dad! You're Paul McCartney, aren't you?' 'Yes darling, but I'm Daddy really'.

Give Ireland back to the Irish, don't make them have to take it away.

Criticism didn't really stop us and it shouldn't ever stop anyone, because critics are only the people who can't get a record deal themselves.

There will be an answer. Let it be.

And Jet, I thought the Major was a lady suffragette.

I didn't earn that much in record royalties. You've only got to look at my sales in 1980 to figure that one out.

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.

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

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.

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 strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold.

Drugs had shown me little bits here and there-they had rolled across the carpet once or twice, but I had been able to get them out of my mind.

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

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

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

My record producer [David Kahne] said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it's going to hit. They don't know when, they don't know where it's coming from. But it's sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that.

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.

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.

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

Lyricists play with words.

Love Me Do, the first song we recorded, John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead because they wanted John to play harmonica.

Linda's at her best when she's doing you a meal at home. That's when you see Linda. She cooks, she looks after the kids.

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

If anyone had told me in the '60s that 20 years later we'd still be talking about whether pot was worse than this or that, I'd have said, Oh, come off it, boys.

I'm trying to do it honestly and genuinely; if some of it's not working to your taste, what can I say?

I'm not into, Hey, what's your sign? or any of that. But I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how I write songs. I don't know why I breathe.

I would quite like to have been a 1920s writer.

I would have liked the Beatles never to have broken up. I wanted to get us back on the road doing small places, then move up to our previous form and then go and play. Just make music, and whatever else there was would be secondary.

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.

I lost my voice. I'd never had to cancel a show before and I had to walk around with a pad and a pen, writing things down.

The music publishing I own is fabulous recording.

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

Every love song I write is for Linda.

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

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

I doubt very much if The Beatles would have happened if it was not for Elvis.

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

John could write a mean song. He had a lot of venom in him. Whereas I had a happy childhood.

We don't eat anything that has to be killed for us.

I have such an admiration for John [Lennon], like most people. But to be the guy who wrote with him, well that's enough. Right there you could retire and go, 'Jesus I had a fantastic life. Take me, Lord.'

We would normally play it to Cynthia or whoever was around

There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.

I'm mad, you know? I don't think of retiring at all.

I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of the Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we'd take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was gear.

I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing. I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs.

One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said: "It's only me." And then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armor, which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armor. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you'd just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.

Fight for the right to live in freedom!

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

Pete Ham in the group was a very good writer. He wrote the Nilsson song "Without You", which is a seriously good song. But the poor fellow topped himself. He was a lovely bloke, I can still see him now. It was a terrible loss.

With life and all I've been through, I do have a belief in goodness, a good spirit. I think what people have done with religion is personified good and evil, so good's become God with 'o' out, and evil's become Devil with a 'd' added. That's my theory of religion.

There will be no wardrobe malfunction with me. I can promise you that.... I have nothing I will be exposing or taking off.

One of things about beards is that, when men reach a certain age, they'd like to see if they can grow one. It's a phenomenon I understand very well. After you get over the itchy face, you go, "Oh, I don't have to shave, that's cool." And then you move into the philosophical thing- people say, "You look weird, you have a beard." And you say, "No, actually, it's weird to shave." Having a beard is natural. When you think about it, shaving it off is quite weird.

I did study Shakespeare, that was sort of my thing; I got a Literature A-level, which is my only claim to academic fame.

I think when you're making an album, as the songs are piling up, one of the good things about it is that you will often write the song that you need.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

I'm not really comfortable singing without accompanying myself on stage - I'm not used to it.

Sometimes when you write a thing you think, 'Oh, this is good', and it's not a modesty or an immodesty thing, you just... it's just the same with anything; when you write a piece you just figure, 'Oh yeah, I'm on a roll here. This is good; I'm getting the hang of this'. Some pieces are better than others.

I am not religious, but I am spiritual.

I can't manage without homeopathy.

I think globally and act locally.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 realized marvelling at nature was a deep pleasure of mine.