I don’t find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
I’m not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
Anybody who thinks pop music’s easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn’t. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren’t particularly youth culture. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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? – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I’ve already done. – Robert Wyatt
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. – Robert Wyatt
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome. – Robert Wyatt
