Explore Quotes by Robert Wyatt

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.

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

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

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.

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 was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair _x000D_ life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally _x000D_ getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

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.

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.

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?

It just doesnt 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.

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

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.

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.

There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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