Robert Wyatt Quotes

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

I don't do live things.

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

The missing links in my life's work, no less!

There are people I would like to work with. It's a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can't really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.

If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.

Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.

Potentially, America is really the greatest, but it's not yet, I don't think. It's too much like an old-fashioned empire, waving the stick and dropping too many bombs on too many people.

What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

It just doesn't mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.

My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.

People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

I would encourage people to realize that you don't have to panic if you're not part of a mainstream, or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn't suit you, don't go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don't just sit moaning or getting drunk - I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that's going to be easier to live with when you're at the end of your life.

I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is.

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."

This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.

I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

I maintain that the greatest crime committed by America - with the possible exception of the carpet-bombing of Laos - was the Disneyfication of Winnie The Pooh.

When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.

Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.

I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.