Robert Wyatt
Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.Collection: Famous
I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.Collection: Moving
I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.Collection: Amazing
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?Collection: Sad
It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.
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.
I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.
I don't do live things.
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.
When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.
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'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'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.
Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
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.
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.
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
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.
I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.
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'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
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.
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.
I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.
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.
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.
I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.
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.
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.
The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.
On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.
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 have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.
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.
In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.
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.
I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.
I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.Collection: Comedian
I'll probably lose every friend I've got, but I think the Russians are about the only people who have behaved decently in the conflict with the Ukraine. All the evidence to the contrary seems a bit bogus to me. NATO is trying to use Ukraine to isolate and cripple Russia, and that's completely crazy and very cruel. It seems to me that our side, the English and American people, really want it to go bad there. But there's no need for it to have done so. At least that's what I think. You won't hear a lot of that on Fox News.Collection: Crazy
I don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.Collection: Hurt
I think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. The US is the Western empire of the 19th century regrouping in the 20th, not out of wickedness, but because everybody else in Eurasia was so completely destroyed by the Second World War. Economically, that was quite a useful time for the US, so they ended up in the position of enormous power. And like any great power, they're going to act in their own interests. The problem is due to what the business community wants, which is to make as much money as they can out of what other people do and pay as little as possible for it.Collection: War
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillarCollection: Butterfly
I stopped drinking a few years ago, and 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. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Years