Top 60 Robert Wyatt Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.”

— Robert Wyatt

2. “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

3. “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.”

— Robert Wyatt

4. “What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I’ve already done...”

— Robert Wyatt

5. “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

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

— Robert Wyatt

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There’s the folky thing of: “Poor me, I’m a sensitive person in a cruel world.” Or the pop thing of: “Hey, look at me, I’m sexy.””

— Robert Wyatt

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Robert Wyatt

15. “I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I’m just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.”

— Robert Wyatt

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Robert Wyatt

20. “Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.”

— Robert Wyatt

21. “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

22. “I don’t do live things.”

— Robert Wyatt

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

— Robert Wyatt

24. “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.”

— Robert Wyatt

25. “I don’t want to be a professional cripple. And I don’t see the suicide stuff as tragic.”

— Robert Wyatt

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Robert Wyatt

29. “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

30. “The missing links in my life’s work, no less!”

— Robert Wyatt

31. “The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren’t particularly youth culture.”

— Robert Wyatt

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I’m just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.”

— Robert Wyatt

39. “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

40. “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

41. “There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.”

— Robert Wyatt

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

— Robert Wyatt

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Robert Wyatt

45. “There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.”

— Robert Wyatt

46. “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

47. “I get slightly irritated by people who say they’re natural rebels because it just means that they’re going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is.”

— Robert Wyatt

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

— Robert Wyatt

49. “There’s no field of music which doesn’t have good ideas.”

— Robert Wyatt

50. “I’m naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, “You’ve got to drive on the right,” I’m not going to drive on the left to show that I’m different. I’m able to stick to the law.”

— Robert Wyatt