Paul McCartney

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

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

Putting two songs together, I've always loved that trick when it works.

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.

But you know as a kid I would have thought of a vegetarian as a wimp.

And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.

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 like the idea that people hear my stuff and if it's commercially successful that's a good sign that it's being heard.

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.

I think the pop industry is still a young man's game.

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.

I can't deal with the press, I hate all those Beatles questions.

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 have not practiced how to be a singer without an instrument.

Somewhere down the line everyone must pay for their misdeeds.

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

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.'

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.

My dad bless him was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.

I was still 15 when I met John Lennon at a village fete in Woolton in Liverpool.