Paul McCartney quotes

Born
18 June 1942, Liverpool, England.

Occupation
Songwriter, singer, musician.

Paul McCartney is an English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. He gained worldwide fame as the bass guitarist and singer for the rock band the Beatles, widely considered the most popular and influential group in the history of pop music.

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

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

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

Love is all you need.
– Paul McCartney

Why would I retire? Sit at home and watch TV? No thanks. I’d rather be out playing.
– Paul McCartney

My so-called career is a haphazard thing.
– Paul McCartney

I think the pop industry is still a young man’s game.
– Paul McCartney

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

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

It’s also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that’s your pool of resources.
– Paul McCartney

Think globally, act locally.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

So, if I’m cooking, I’ll be steaming vegetables, making some nice salad, that kind of stuff.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

Putting two songs together, I’ve always loved that trick when it works.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

Lyricists play with words.
– Paul McCartney

I’m the worst on facts about me or facts about the Beatles.
– Paul McCartney

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

It’s time to end the cruel slaughter of whales and leave these magnificent creatures alone.
– Paul McCartney

But with writers, there’s nothing wrong with melancholy. It’s an important color in writing.
– Paul McCartney

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

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

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

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

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

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– 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

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

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

My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.
– 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 like the idea that people hear my stuff, and if it’s commercially successful, that’s a good sign that it’s being heard.
– Paul McCartney

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

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

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

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
– Paul McCartney

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better. It’s a little better all the time.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– 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

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney

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

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.
– Paul McCartney

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.
– Paul McCartney