Paul McCartney
English singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, record and film producer, poet, painter, and animal rights and peace activist.
We probably seem to be anti-religious...none of us believes in God.
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.
While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like The International Times. We opened the Indica gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece of music called 4’33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed he would say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence—it’s music.’ I was intrigued by all of that. So these things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen; one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses—most of the time, anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.
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.
What a fucking great band we were.
We're constantly being asked all sorts of very profound questions. But we're not very profound people. People say, 'What do you think of the H-bomb, of religion, of fan worship?' But we didn't really start thinking about these things until people asked us. And even then we didn't get much time to consider them. What do I think of the H-bomb? Well, here's an answer with the full weight of five O levels and one A level behind it: I don't agree with it.
Hey Jude, don't make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better.
You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs
I look around me and I see it isn't so
Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know
'Cause here I go again...
I love you.
She's lovely, great. She was very friendly. She was just like a mum to us.
I thought the only lonely place was on the moon.
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.
Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
I want her everywhere
and if she's beside me I know I need never care.
But to love her is to need her
To lead a better life,
I need my love to be here.
I tend not to say much on the phone now. If I leave a message, it's benign. You edit yourself according to the new circumstances of the new world. I think it would be quite good to get some sort of laws.
We thought we'd be really big in Liverpool.
Will you still need me,
will you still feed me,
when I'm sixty-four?
I don't have any desire to learn. I feel it's like a voodoo, that it would spoil things if I actually learnt how things are done.