Robert Wyatt Quotes

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Robert Wyatt

Profession : Musician

Birth : January 28, 1945

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

Robert Wyatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

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

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

Robert Wyatt

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.

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

I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

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

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

Robert Wyatt