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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

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Robert Wyatt
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 28
Composer
Drummer
Musician
Recording Artist
Singer
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Robert Ellidge Wyatt
States
Anti
Government
Acts
Think
Century
Thinking
Quite
Like
Politics
People
American
Imperial
United
Reverse
Power
European

More quotes by Robert Wyatt

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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
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Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
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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.
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Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
Robert Wyatt
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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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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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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
Robert Wyatt
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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
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The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
Robert Wyatt
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On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.
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
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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
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
Robert Wyatt
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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
Robert Wyatt