Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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 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.
Paul's last words to Linda: "You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It's a fine spring day. We're riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear-blue".
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 used to go round to Aunt Mimi's house and John would be at the typewriter, which was fairly unusual in Liverpool. None of my mates even knew what a typewriter was. Well they knew what it was but they didn't hae one. Nobody had one.
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.
I tried heroin just the once. Even then, I didn't realize I'd taken it. I was just handed something, smoked it, then found out what it was. It didn't do anything for me, which was lucky because I wouldn't have fancied heading down that road.
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.
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.
Painting is similar to music. You get a couple or words or notes or chords that excite you, and you just follow them and add a bit more and see where it takes you. That's the thrill for me. It still is a thrill, which is amazing after all this time.
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.
It (LSD) opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think of what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world if the politicians would take LSD. There wouldn't be any more war or poverty or famine.
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.
I think it's something to do with the structural quality of the songs. We weren't actually trying to make stuff that was cool, or of the moment, although a lot of it was. We were trying to make stuff that was good enough to stick around and lo and behold, it has.
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.
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!
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.
I'm actually doing what I want with my life. I do sometime think I could just shut up and rest on my laurels and say: you know what guys, I'll operate out of the pocket you put me in.... but no way! No way I'm gonna do that! I'd just get bored stiff the first minute.
My thing is about following the accidental, more than trying to paint an accurate bowl of apples. I enjoy most following the paint. It leads me somewhere else. I think I enjoy just letting the magic unfold and letting the spirit of the paint tell me where we're going.
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 dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous. So when we got on a bus, he would always encourage me and my younger brother to get up and offer our seat to an old lady. I grew up kind of liking that, thinking, y'know, that's a nice thing, that's a courtesy.
Many years ago I was fishing, and as I was reeling in the poor fish, I realised, 'I am killing him - all for the passing pleasure it brings me'. Something inside me clicked. I realised as I watched him fight for breath that his life was as important to him as mine is to me.
When I left the Beatles, I made an album called McCartney that I played everything on. And it was kind of a cool experience. I felt like a professor in a laboratory, just crafting stuff and adding this, and putting this on and moving the microphone, and it was very homemade.
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.
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.
Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules. And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys, who then formed into this band called the Beatles and did all that work. I have to think that was something metaphysical. Something alchemic. Something that must be thought of as magic.
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.
People don't like land mines, especially the survivors and the people who are living in the countries with them. They think they are cowardly, like we do, so I think it's down to the governments to actually just listen to the people and sign the treaty and get rid of all these things and there would be an end to it.
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.
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.
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.