Explore Quotes by Robert Wyatt

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 have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

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 don't do live things.

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

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

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

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.

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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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