Robyn Hitchcock quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I was always jealous of something getting more attention.

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

Dreams are a scientific fact.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

You can't censor people's dreams.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Let there be more darkness

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.

Love is the distance between reality and pain.

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

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.

Production is something Ive never come to terms with.

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.

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.

Using the word weird implies that there is a norm.

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.