Paul McCartney

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

The Beatles were always a great band. Nothing more, nothing less.
– Paul McCartney

It’s like if you’re an astronaut and you’ve been to the moon, what do you want to do with the
rest of your life?
– Paul McCartney

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

I’m really glad that most of our songs were about love, peace and understanding.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

I’m always trying to do better music. I don’t know if I’ve written my best song yet. That’s the
big question. It doesn’t stop you trying.
– Paul McCartney

We didn’t all get into music for a job! We got into music to avoid a job, in truth – and get lots
of girls.
– Paul McCartney

John’s in love with Yoko and he’s no longer in love with the other three of us.
– Paul McCartney

What I do is I look for the positive side. I’m the only guy who sat down with John and wrote
all those songs. It’s me. I’ve got to pinch myself, I can’t believe it. I just feel blessed to have
known him and to have experienced his presence so intimately.
– Paul McCartney

Us, communists? Why, we can’t be communists. We’re the world’s number one capitalists.
Imagine us: Communists!
– Paul McCartney

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 and all that kind of thing.
– Paul McCartney

I think that, particularly in the old days, the spirit of The Beatles seemed to suggest something
very hopeful and youthful.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney, 1969

I’m mad, you know? I don’t think of retiring at all.
– Paul McCartney

I love to hear a choir. I love the humanity to see the faces of real people devoting
themselves to a piece of music. I like the teamwork. It makes me feel optimistic about the
human race when I see them cooperating like that.
– Paul McCartney

I don’t ever try to make a serious social comment.
– Paul McCartney

I’m not religious, but I’m very spiritual.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

Certainly, for me, if we were ever on stage, the three of us, there’d be someone missing… I’d
look over there and there’d be someone missing and that’d be John.
– Paul McCartney

I realize now that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

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

There’s a lot of random in our songs… writing, thinking, letting others think of bits. Then
bam! You’ve the jigsaw puzzle.
– Paul McCartney

I can’t deal with the press; I hate all those Beatles questions.
– Paul McCartney

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

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.”
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

The further away you get from the heyday of The Beatles, the more amazing it becomes. It’s
grown in stature. At the time, we thought we’d be lucky to last for five years.
– Paul McCartney

I don’t work at being ordinary.
– Paul McCartney

It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard “Heartbreak Hotel” I
thought, this is it.
– Paul McCartney

We tried many times to meet Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker, his manager would just show up with
a few souvenirs, and that would have to do us for a while. We didn’t feel brushed off we felt
we deserved to be brushed off. After all, he was Elvis, and who were we to dare to want to
meet him? But we finally received an invitation to go round and see him when he was making
a film in Hollywood.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

Think globally, act locally.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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!
– Paul McCartney

Sadness isn’t sadness. It’s happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They’re balls of
laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It’s life that’s jumped off a tall cliff.
– Paul McCartney

If you can play your stuff in a pub, then you’re a good band.
– Paul McCartney

You know, I’m not one of these people that just because I’ve done all that I now become
Superman. You can’t touch me. You know, you can touch me. I’m very, unfortunately, very
reachable.
– Paul McCartney

I’ve seen those famous Nixon transcripts where Elvis actually starts to try to shop us – The
Beatles! He’s in the transcript saying – to Richard Nixon, of all people – “Well, sir, these
Beatles, they’re very un-American and they take drugs.” I felt a bit betrayed by that, I must
say. The great joke is that we were taking drugs, and look what happened to him. He was
caught on the toilet full of them! It was sad, but I still love him, particularly in his early
period. He was very influential on me.
– Paul McCartney

The two of us were on fire every time we sat down to write.
– Paul McCartney

The thing is, we’re all really the same person. We’re just four parts of the one.
– Paul McCartney

When we were kids we always used to say, “Okay, whoever dies first, get a message through.”
When John died, I thought, “Well, maybe we’ll get a message” because I know he knew the deal.
I haven’t had a message from John.
– Paul McCartney

We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened
to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing
down at our plates, we suddenly realised we were eating the leg of an animal who had until
recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said, “Wait a minute, we
love these sheep. They’re such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?” It was the
last time we ever did.
– Paul McCartney

It’s hard to follow my own act. But the only answer to that would be to give up after the
Beatles. I only had two alternatives. Give up or carry on.
– Paul McCartney

Something like George passing, it makes you think, “God, things are so impermanent. Suddenly
there’s this little friend of mine, he used to get on the bus, and now he’s passed away.”
There’s that whole lifetime of a friendship that physically has ended, not emotionally.
– Paul McCartney

When two great saints meet, it’s a humbling experience.
– Paul McCartney

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature
than in the young.
– Paul McCartney

What used to happen before we came on the scene, people used to have writers, so someone
like Elvis would have people writing his stuff for him, Leiber and Stoller, people like that. We
kind of upset the boat a bit. We came along and we were writing our own stuff, so we came
along and put some of those people out of work, which you know was ok for us, not so good
for them.
– Paul McCartney

We wanted peace on earth, love, and understanding between everyone around the world. We
have learned that change comes slowly.
– Paul McCartney

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
– Paul McCartney