1.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
2.
An un-named song is like an un-named child, it has no identity.
Robyn Hitchcock
3.
As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.
Robyn Hitchcock
4.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
5.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
6.
Every so often you have to increase your profile so you can let it lower again, like a balloon.
Robyn Hitchcock
7.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
8.
I can tell how I'm doing, and I can tell if the crowd is particularly dead.
Robyn Hitchcock
9.
The universe is based on sullen entropy;
It falls apart as it goes on
Robyn Hitchcock
10.
Playing acoustic and line drawings are the two things I'm most competent at.
Robyn Hitchcock
11.
One of the ideas behind doing this acoustic record is that I didn't want to have to produce it by committee.
Robyn Hitchcock
12.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
13.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
14.
Everyone has a right to change their consciousness, but ultimately the whole process is misleading.
Robyn Hitchcock
15.
You realize that the first Bryan Ferry album was pretty good although at the time it seemed a bit cheesy.
Robyn Hitchcock
16.
I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him.
Robyn Hitchcock
17.
Love is the distance between reality and pain.
Robyn Hitchcock
18.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
19.
I could never be a professional comedian, 'cause you have to keep telling the same jokes. For me, they're like word solos.
Robyn Hitchcock
20.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
21.
If you do things out of time you're weird.
Robyn Hitchcock
22.
Let there be more darkness
Robyn Hitchcock
23.
Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.
Robyn Hitchcock
24.
I'm 63. It's kind extraordinary that I'm out here at all and people want to see me.
Robyn Hitchcock
25.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
26.
I'm not really a good singer. But most people aren't, either.
Robyn Hitchcock
27.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
28.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
29.
Coming out's the hardest part, when you're Queen Elvis.
Robyn Hitchcock
30.
Superman, Superman, crunchy little Superman. Found you in a Cornflakes box.
Robyn Hitchcock
31.
I'm good at line-drawing, and some of my color stuff is okay. So I just do it for record covers.
Robyn Hitchcock
32.
After the Soft Boys I just didn't want to work with any more guitarists.
Robyn Hitchcock
33.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
34.
Production is something Ive never come to terms with.
Robyn Hitchcock
35.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
36.
Most comedians I know are quite serious, anxious people who find life rather difficult. As a consequence, they make people laugh.
Robyn Hitchcock
37.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
38.
Generally, I have an instinct for the noncommercial. And the unpopular.
Robyn Hitchcock
39.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
40.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
41.
I think The Beatles are the lasting influence on me, even more so than Dylan.
Robyn Hitchcock
42.
As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.
Robyn Hitchcock
43.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
44.
Using the word weird implies that there is a norm.
Robyn Hitchcock
45.
If you miss someone too much you turn into them... though it doesn't seem to work for the Christian Church.
Robyn Hitchcock
46.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
47.
Promoting a record on a major label is like running a minor military campaign.
Robyn Hitchcock
48.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock
49.
Comedy is what happens when you cross the dateline from the unbearable. Things become so unbearable they become a joke.
Robyn Hitchcock
50.
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.
Robyn Hitchcock