Robert Wyatt Quotes

I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.

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.

I'm nearly 50. I'm past being photographed falling out of bars.

Writing a love song when I was 19 is very different than writing a love song when I'm 25. You're more sophisticated; you can elaborate and pinpoint special things a little clearer.

You get clarity as you get sober, and you get clarity as you get older.

Not many people do at the age of 21 or younger even, know how to act nor could be concerned with anything other than fighting, women and money.

I don't need to be a frontman all the time, and in fact, the older I get, the less of an urge it is inside me to play that role. I've still got it inside me, and I do occasionally allow it out.

I'm not afraid of a rant, am I? I've got to that point where I've just become a woman; I think I've just grown.

Turning 50 is a little bit of a 'taking stock' moment. I feel probably a little dumber. I don't think I'm as sharp as I was when I was younger, but I'm definitely wiser and less likely to make gigantic blunders of an intellectual, spiritual, emotional or physical type.

I had years of partying, and I was kind of surprised and happy I survived it all. Now, being a parent, I look back on it thinking, Oh God, the things you did!

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

Love has more depth as you get older.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.

I'm not much of a partier anymore. I enjoy clarity much more.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Some relationships get easier as you get older, depending on what sort of person you are. I don't think I've got any better at them.

If I had one regret in life... it's that I was not more humble at an earlier age.

I am not getting any younger and am taking a new approach to life.

Once you get older, you get a little closer to yourself, intimate.

I'm getting older and I'm just coming to terms that I'm stuck with me so I better try to like myself.

The ordinary experiences of aging alter and clarify your view of past, present, and future.

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan.