Robert Wyatt

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.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

It just doesn't 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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

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

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

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.

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 have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.