Robert Fripp

“My life has improved so much since I stopped doing interviews.”

“What is necessary is possible, what we want is expensive. What is unnecessary is unlikely.”

“The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.”

“According to USA today, the average length of an attention span of a man in America is 23 minutes.”

“And if you are playing in several meters at once, there has to be a - not a rigid - but there definitely has to be a reference to a common pulse in the band.”

“I recommend my students not to be professional unless they really have to be. I tell them, 'If you love music, sell Hoovers or be a plumber. Do something useful with your life.'”

“I couldn't concentrate on music. So I made the choice to give up my career as a musician in the frontline to deal with the business.”

“Now, if King Crimson accepts responsibility for innovating its own tradition, you can't accept responsibility for the audience. And there is an enormous tangible weight of expectation, which comes from an audience attending a King Crimson concert.”

“A mistake is always forgivable, rarely excusable and always unacceptable.”

“Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance.”

“Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band.”

“My life as a professional musician is a joyless exercise in futility.”

“I'm not really interested in music. Music is just a means of creating a magical state.”

“If an apprentice does not hear what a master hears, is then that quality not present in the music? Yes and no. In the world in which the apprentice lives no.”

“Even within the band, if I cannot manage to persuade the members of what I see to be the next course of action, how do you expect the group to deal with the expectations of thousands of people. It is not possible.”

“The perception of the audience is the interesting part. If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on or not?”

“Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.”

“To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.”

“Music can be transformative, utterly transformative. The act of music is utterly transformative.”

“If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?”