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.
Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.
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.
Decca had blown it by refusing us, so they had tried to save face by asking George, Know any other groups?
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.
George Martin, he's very good at a very sort of lush, sweet arrangement.
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.
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.
I can't deal with the press; I hate all those Beatles questions.
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.
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 do feel it was sad that we never actually sat down and straightened our differences out. But the last phone conversation I had with him was really great, and we didn't have any kind of blowup.
I do feel it's like a Paul McCartney tour.
I don't ever try to make a serious social comment.
I don't know anything about the Appalachian mountains or cowboys and Indians or anything. I just made it up.
I don't take me seriously. If we get some giggles, I don't mind.
I don't work at being ordinary.
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.
I guess the ultimate luxury professionally is to be able to change your direction, to work in another medium.
I had this song called Helter Skelter, which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise.
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... .
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.
I like most kinds of music. So I haven't got a bag, as they say... except the big black one in the hall outside.
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.
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.
I never really got on that well with Yoko anyway. Strangely enough, I only started to get to know her after John's death.
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.
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 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.
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 used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.
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.
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.
I usually shared a room with George.
I wanted him to have his child and move to New York, to do all the things he'd wanted-to learn Japanese, to expand himself.
I was impossible. I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, an unemployed worker.
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 would quite like to have been a 1920s writer.
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'm pretty diverse because I haven't got one sort of thing.
I'm trying to do it honestly and genuinely; if some of it's not working to your taste, what can I say?
I've got to admit it's getting better. It's a little better all the time.
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.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
It was a period when they used to read into our lyrics a lot, used to think there was more in them than there was.
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.
It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard "Heartbreak Hotel" I thought, this is it.
It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.
It's like a lot of kids; when you tell them someone's died, they laugh.
John and I were sitting 'round playing guitar, and we were with Donovan. I started playing chords, just messing around, and we started just to write them down. They came very quickly.
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.
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.
Love is all you need.
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.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds actually wasn't meant to say LSD. It was a drawing that John's son brought home from school. Lucy was a kid in his school.
Lyricists play with words.
My arrest was on every bloody TV set. The other prisoners all knew who I was and asked me to sing.
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 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.
None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.
Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.
Now everything is so much more important and serious.
On Sgt. Pepper we had more instrumentation than we'd ever had. More orchestral stuff than we'd ever used before, so it was more of a production.
One of the main shocks was that I wouldn't have a band. I remember John's reaction was that, too. You know, How am I going to get my songs out now?
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.'
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.
The music publishing I own is fabulous recording.
The Russians were fantastic. I'd never been, so it was a great first visit. We got to see St Petersburg and Moscow and everything.
The strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold.
The whole thing with Wings and then that being a success, y'know, with Linda. That was really exciting, but in different ways.
There are a lot of artists who haven't lost anything to domesticity. In my case, it probably did happen.
There are only four people who knew what the Beatles were about anyway.
There definitely was something there with some of the Wings songs.
They say, Oh you must be really tired. And I say, No, I love it, y'know.
Think globally, act locally.
This was one of the best things about Lennon and McCartney, the competitive element within the team. It was great. But hard to live with.
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.
We played in Red Square and Heather and I got invited to the Kremlin with Mr. Putin.
We thought we might have about five or 10 years tops with the group, but it just continued.
We thought, Well now we're coming up to 30, it's time to retire isn't it?
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.
When the four of us got together, we were definitely better than the four of us individually. One of the things we had going for us was that we'd been together a long time. It made us very tight.
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.
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!
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.
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.
With Come Together, John wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smoky, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot. I was quite pleased.
He had a successful post-Beatles group Wings. (1971-1980)
He has never been able to read musical notation; instead he writes and plays by ear.
His performance in the Superbowl XXXIX was a year after the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" incident involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. When a reporter ask him that would happen again, McCartney said as a joke that no because everybody would play naked.
He was marginally the tallest Beatle, beating George Harrison by a half inch.
He was half of the techno duo The Fireman.
A lyric sheet to his song "Yesterday" is featured on the front cover of the Marillion album "Script for a Jester's Tear" (released 1983).
He won a last-minute court order preventing Christie's from auctioning his handwritten lyrics to song "Hey Jude." Paper with lyrics scrawled on it had been expected to bring up to $116,000 at auction scheduled for April 30, but England's High Court, ruled for Sir Paul the day before, deciding that the valuable Beatles artifact will remain at auction house until ownership is finally determined by agreement or trial.
He was fined $200 in 1973 for growing marijuana on his Scotland farm. Arrested and jailed briefly in Japan in 1980 for carrying same substance.
He was named one of E!'s "Top 20 Entertainers of 2001."
He played all the instruments on two of his solo albums, 'McCartney' (1970) and 'McCartney II' (1980).
He was awarded the Polar Music Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music Award, in 1992.
He appeared as himself in Tracey Ullman's "They Don't Know" music video.
He sang backup on Donovan's "Mellow Yellow." He also played bass on some of his album tracks.
He was actually the only Beatle to graduate from Britain's equivalent of high-school; he majored in Art.
He was knighted in 1997.
Nickname: Macca.
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