Robyn hitchcock quotes

People from the past always seem to have much more time to create beautiful, intricate, delicate things that often reach the future in a kind of curled-up, capsized state.

I think The Beatles are the lasting influence on me, even more so than Dylan.

The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.

If people were really naked and everyone knew what each other was thinking, everyone would probably just laugh... or they'd lock each other up.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

Everyone has a right to change their consciousness, but ultimately the whole process is misleading.

Most comedians I know are quite serious, anxious people who find life rather difficult. As a consequence, they make people laugh.

Generally, I have an instinct for the noncommercial. And the unpopular.

In this world of doubt, one thing is certain for me; that I will go on writing songs up to and - I hope, through heavenly means or diabolical - beyond the day I die.

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.

I'm 63. It's kind extraordinary that I'm out here at all and people want to see me.

Love is the distance between reality and pain.

When I first started listening to music intently as a teenager, I was always sitting there with a biro or a pencil, drawing. That's how I absorbed it all.

As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.

The universe is based on sullen entropy; It falls apart as it goes on

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

Coming out's the hardest part, when you're Queen Elvis.

Like trillions of others, if it wasn't for Bob Dylan, it would have been a different musical landscape. Pop music wouldn't have been my thing at all. I did also grow up listening to The Beatles, but I never thought of being a Beatle.

I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him.

Production is something Ive never come to terms with.

If you make money back from your record, you're doing it smart. It's an expensive hobby. I'm lucky enough to still make a living as a musician through live work and odd bits of royalties.

I thin many people's deviant behavior starts with dreams because dreams are so non-linear... as if there's an assumption that everything has to be linear or has to be plotted.

There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.

One of the ideas behind doing this acoustic record is that I didn't want to have to produce it by committee.

Just as with a guitar, you can improvise a guitar solo, and they'd probably be similar each time, but they won't be exactly the same. With the word, it's probably a bit freer than that. I probably repeat myself more musically than I do verbally.

We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what.

Comedy is what happens when you cross the dateline from the unbearable. Things become so unbearable they become a joke.

I'm good at line-drawing, and some of my color stuff is okay. So I just do it for record covers.

Let there be more darkness

Playing acoustic and line drawings are the two things I'm most competent at.

I'm not really a good singer. But most people aren't, either.

I could never be a professional comedian, 'cause you have to keep telling the same jokes. For me, they're like word solos.

Every so often you have to increase your profile so you can let it lower again, like a balloon.

If you miss someone too much you turn into them... though it doesn't seem to work for the Christian Church.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

I've never been burdened with a hit record, so I don't have to play the same songs. I play songs people think they like.

After Nashville sushi and a long debate on Bob Dylan, we went into Woodland Studios at 10 pm that night for a look around, and jammed for 5 hours solid.

I would be quite happy never to play any of my better-known songs again. But unless you're Dylan, you can't afford to completely disregard what your audience wants.

If you do things out of time you're weird.

Promoting a record on a major label is like running a minor military campaign.

The band is like a vintage car. You take it out to go for a spin for a couple miles, but you wouldn't drive across the country.

Using the word weird implies that there is a norm.

An un-named song is like an un-named child, it has no identity.

I was always jealous of something getting more attention.

You realize that the first Bryan Ferry album was pretty good although at the time it seemed a bit cheesy.

I don't advocate Stalinist monolithic state structures any more than I advocate capitalistic monoliths. Unfortunately, human society tends to the monolithic, whether you go to the left or right, everybody in leathers, or everybody holding Chairman Mao's book, and if everybody goes to one end of the pitch, I always go to the other.

If I played just one song from every album, I would be onstage for two and a half hours. No one wants a show that long.

Superman, Superman, crunchy little Superman. Found you in a Cornflakes box.

After the Soft Boys I just didn't want to work with any more guitarists.

I became a musician because that's really what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, but I had other abilities.

When you think about great teams, The Beatles and the Pythons immediately spring to mind. The Pythons were as much a part of their time as The Beatles.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

I can tell how I'm doing, and I can tell if the crowd is particularly dead.