A biography for Robert Wyatthasn’t been written yet.
“I don't do live things.”
“People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.”
“What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.”
“There are people I would like to work with. It's a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I can't really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.”
“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.”
“I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.”
“I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.”
“I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.”
“There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.”
“If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.”
“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.”
“I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.”
“When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.”
“I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.”
“The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.”
“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.”