Robert Wyatt

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

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.

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 the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

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.