Robert Wyatt quotes

Robert Wyatt is a highly influential English musician and songwriter. With a career spanning over five decades, Wyatt has established himself as a pioneer of the progressive rock and jazz fusion genres. Known for his distinctively soulful voice and intricate songwriting, his work has inspired countless artists. From his early days as the drummer and vocalist for the band Soft Machine to his successful solo career, Wyatt has created a rich and diverse discography. Whether it's his poignant lyrics or his experimental musical arrangements, Wyatt's contributions to the music world are nothing short of remarkable. Discover more about this iconic musician and his timeless music.

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

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.

- Robert Wyatt

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.

- 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

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

- Robert Wyatt

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.

- Robert Wyatt

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

- 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

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

- 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 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

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.

- Robert Wyatt

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.

- 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

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

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

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

- Robert Wyatt

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.

- Robert Wyatt

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

- 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 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

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

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

- Robert Wyatt

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.

- Robert Wyatt

I don't do live things.

- 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.

- Robert Wyatt

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

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

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

- Robert Wyatt