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It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own 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
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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 don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.
Robert Wyatt -
I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.
Robert Wyatt -
It just doesnt 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 -
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 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
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What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.
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 -
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
Robert Wyatt -
People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.
Robert Wyatt -
I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
Robert Wyatt -
I think it's hypocritical to complain about the rise of China. For 50 years, we were telling everybody in the world that the big threat was Communism, so now the countries that were Communists are now rampant capitalists - and they're doing very well, in some ways much better than the UK. Well, we asked for it. We told them that's what you have to do, and they're doing it, buying up your biggest hotels in New York. You have to laugh.
Robert Wyatt
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Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.
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'll probably lose every friend I've got, but I think the Russians are about the only people who have behaved decently in the conflict with the Ukraine. All the evidence to the contrary seems a bit bogus to me. NATO is trying to use Ukraine to isolate and cripple Russia, and that's completely crazy and very cruel. It seems to me that our side, the English and American people, really want it to go bad there. But there's no need for it to have done so. At least that's what I think. You won't hear a lot of that on Fox News.
Robert Wyatt -
Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.
Robert Wyatt -
I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.
Robert Wyatt -
Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
Robert Wyatt
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The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.
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 only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.
Robert Wyatt -
The cultural mix that's happened in the United States is wonderful! Funny enough, one of the most wonderful things about it is that there is no American race.
Robert Wyatt