Quotes By Robert Wyatt

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

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.

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

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

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

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.

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

Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

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 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?

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.

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

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