Roger Waters Quotes

1. I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before it's time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death…

2. Well, anyway, I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the War.

3. I have no problem with any question.








4. Money it's a gas Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash New car, caviar, four star daydream, Think I'll buy me a football team.

5. It was very, very hard work organizing that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with - Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor…She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick it up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go ("brogue") "Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong" and burst into tears.

6. In 1987 or '88, Etienne and Nadine came with a manuscript... It was all handwritten, with illustrations by Nadine. They asked if I would set it to music.




7. I have nothing against Dave Gilmour furthering his own goals. It's just the idea of Dave's solo career masquerading as Pink Floyd that offends me!

8. Andrew Lloyd Webber sickens me. He's in your face all the time and what he does is nonsense. It has no value. It is shallow, derivative rubbish, all of it, and it makes me very gloomy. Actually, I've never been to one of his shows but having put that slightly savage joke on the record, I thought I'd better listen to some Andrew Lloyd Webber and I was staying in a rented house in America this summer and the people who owned the house had a whole bunch of his rubbish so I thought I'd listen to "Phantom Of The Opera" and I put the record on and I was slightly apprehensive. I thought: "Christ, I hope this isn't good - or even mediocre". I was not disappointed. "Phantom Of The Opera" is absolutely f... horrible from start to finish.

9. (At Live Earth on global warming) I think what you can do is vote…This problem will not be solved until we the electorates make it quite clear to candidates running for office that we will not vote for them unless they have a clear policy on the environment and global warming in particular. And also we will not vote for them if they have a track record like this current administration does.

10. Radio One won't play my f...single ("What God Wants") because they know it's no good. They know it's not as good as Erasure or Janet f... Jackson. They know that the British public shouldn't be listening to it. It makes my blood boil! If you're not 17 with a baseball hat on back to front, they don't want to know.

11. I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.






12. I was quite happy standing there thundering about, playing whatever I could - that's "fun". And I see young bands occasionally now doing the same thing. I think it's called "thrash" now. It's the same thing: It's just kids who can't play, pissing about. It's terrific. That's all we were doing. I mean, Dave could play a little bit, but none of the rest of us could.

13. (asked what his artistic purpose was) There is no purpose. We do whatever we do. You either blow your brains out or get on with something.


14. It's like saying "Give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton," you know. It's not true. And give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer, and he doesn't become whoever, you know. He doesn't become us.

15. Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

16. In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

17. It's a miracle was the last track recorded for the album, we based it on the rhythm from the middle of "Late Home Tonight", where there's Graham Broad playing lots and lots of drums with me shouting in the background, pretending to be a mad Arab leader.

18. It's actually quite emotional, standing up here with these three guys after all these years, standing to be counted with the rest of you. Anyway, we're doing this for everyone who's not here, and particularly of course for Syd.




19. I confess I've never felt like a passenger.

20. (on Syd Barrett) On the club scene we rate about two out of ten and "Must try harder." We've had problems with our equipment and we can't get the P.A. to work because we play extremely loudly. It's a pity because Syd (singer Syd Barrett) writes great lyrics and nobody ever hears them.

21. What it comes down to for me is: Will the technologies of communication and culture - and especially popular music, which is a vast and beloved enterprise - help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?

22. (on Syd Barrett) Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968.

23. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

24. (on Syd Barrett) Syd was a genius. But I wouldn't want to go back to playing "Interstellar Overdrive" for hours and hours.

25. We were contracted to make a soundtrack album but there really wasn't enough new material in the movie to make a new record that I thought was interesting.






26. (on Syd Barrett) Oh, they (the Media) definitely don't want to know the real Barrett story…there are no facts involved in the Barrett story so they can make up any story they like, and they do. There's a vague basis in fact: Syd was in the band and he did write the material on the first album, 80% of it, but that's all. It is only that one album, and that's what people don't realize. That first album, and one track on the second. That's all; nothing else.

27. I'm in competition with myself and I'm losing.

28. (on Syd Barrett) I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights and perceptions. In fact for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me 15 years to get anywhere near there. Even though he was clearly out of control when making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs. Maybe that's what "Dark Side of the Moon" was aspiring to. A similar feeling.

29. The very early days of Pink Floyd were magical. We played small auditoriums for entranced audiences, and there was a wonderful sense of communion. We got overpowered by the weight of success and numbers - not just the money but the size of the audience. I became very disenchanted. I had to make the choice of staying on the treadmill or making the braver decision to travel a more difficult path alone.

30. The only realistic option is to divide the cake differently. After Live8 and the G8 summit, at least people are beginning to make noises about changing the deep imbalance in the world...I come back to the UK quite often. I didn't leave as a protest against the hunting ban I was following a child in the wake of a divorce.

31. You take the risk of being rejected.

32. I think that happiness resides somewhere between the extremes of personal, religious, and political. I think happiness resides where we understand someone else's point of view and needs. Happiness resides where we are not lost in the solitary dream.

33. When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing.

34. Eventually, though...Sony urged me to use English instead of French, so I wrote an English version of Etienne and Nadine's work, and then I felt compelled to expand on their original text. Their work was really a series of gorgeous tableaux, and I added more personal narrative and history for some of the characters.

35. For us the most important thing is to be visual, and for the cats watching us to have fun. This is all we want. We get very upset if people get bored when we're only half way through smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear Arnold Layne and they flip all over again.

36. I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.

37. Who is the strongest, who is the best, who holds the aces, the East or the West. This is the crap our children are learning.





38. We've got the recording side together and not the playing side.

39. Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records.

40. I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

41. It's not just a piece about the French Revolution, it's about revolution in a much broader sense, and it's about the capacity that human beings have for personal change. The piece is an exultation and an encouragement to those of us who believe the human race can discover its humanity and its capacity for empathy to the point where it may be possible for us at some point to guarantee the basic human rights of the individual (around the world).

42. Earlier this year we went skiing and I was in a shop, paying a bill and there was a woman standing there whom I knew slightly. I was waiting for my bill and she was buying something, a tea strainer. Quite suddenly she said to me: "Where was your Father killed?". I was very surprised and blurted out "Oh Anzio". Now this is a woman of about my age, so she's 40-ish. She said: "My Father was killed in the war". Apparently somebody lent her a copy of "The Final Cut" and she had listened to the whole thing and she had found it very moving. In fact she said it had moved her to tears. She told me this, standing in the shop, with some effort I suspect, and I remember thinking: "That's enough really. It doesn't matter if the Americans don't buy it".

43. All my life...I have been preoccupied with the great tragedy of losing family in wars. The pain of losing a parent or a child in (an act of) violence that is purposefully and directly generated by political forces is in a certain way harder to bear than if someone dies in, say, an accident. The death feels more preventable.

44. I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of Tony Blair's foreign policy.


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