And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.
My so-called career is a haphazard thing.
If children are studying the 20th century, I'm in their text books.
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 can't deal with the press; I hate all those Beatles questions.
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?
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.
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.
Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.
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".
In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
I don't work at being ordinary.
My dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous.
I love the past. There are parts of the past I hate, of course.
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.
The Stones also still have a huge following. Mick Jagger leaps around like a crazy dude. And Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts are playing great too.
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'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.
Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.
Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don't always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.
Microphones are just like people, if you shout at them, they get scared.
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!
I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual.
I'm often reading a magazine and hearing about someone's new record, and I think, 'Oh, boy, that's gonna be better than me.' It's a very common thing.
What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.
Lyricists play with words.
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.
My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.
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.
Think globally, act locally.
You see, my mother was a district nurse until she died when I was 14, and we used to move from time to time because of her work.
Putting two songs together, I've always loved that trick when it works.
Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.
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.
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.
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
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.
None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.
So, if I'm cooking, I'll be steaming vegetables, making some nice salad, that kind of stuff.
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.
I never really got on that well with Yoko anyway. Strangely enough, I only started to get to know her after John's death.
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.
And, in the end The love you take is equal to the love you make.
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 was still 15 when I met John Lennon at a village fete in Woolton, in Liverpool.
There are only four people who knew what the Beatles were about anyway.
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.
The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
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.
