Quotes from Robert Wyatt

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

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

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

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

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

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.

I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.

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

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.

People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

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.

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