Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
Robert Wyatt

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
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 don't do live things.
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

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 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

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

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

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

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 prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
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 think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
Robert Wyatt

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.
Robert Wyatt

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

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

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

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