Robert Wyatt Quotes
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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.
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I stopped drinking a few years ago, and drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.
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On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.
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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.
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We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.
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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.
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I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.
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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.
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I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.
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I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
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I don't want an entire world full of people just drinking Coca-Cola and eating McDonald's hamburgers and listening to American pop records. That would be a lesser world. I hope the cultural diversity is rich and is able to survive the Westernization of their economies.
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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.
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I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.
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What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.
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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
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Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.