Robert Wyatt Quotes

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Robert Wyatt

Profession : Musician

Birth : January 28, 1945

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

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 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

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

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

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

I don't do live things.

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

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

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'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

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

Robert Wyatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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