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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
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Politics
People
American
Imperial
United
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European
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Anti
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More quotes by Robert Wyatt

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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
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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.
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I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
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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
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What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.
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
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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 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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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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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.
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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 don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
Robert Wyatt
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The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
Robert Wyatt
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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
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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'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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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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What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
Robert Wyatt
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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.
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