Roger Waters Quotes & Sayings

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. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

I'm in competition with myself and I'm losing. — Roger Waters

I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war. — Roger Waters

But that's not to say that the potential for the sun to shine doesn't exist. You know? Walk down the path towards the light, rather than walk into the darkness. — Roger Waters

All alone, or in two's,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall. — Roger Waters

Why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it's a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it's also a terrible burden. — Roger Waters

I have no problem with any question. — Roger Waters

You take the risk of being rejected. If you have pretentions to be an artist of any kind, you have to take the risk of people rejecting you and thinking you're an arsehole. — Roger Waters

I don't really listen to Radiohead. I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music. — Roger Waters

Each small candle lights a corner of the dark. — Roger Waters

money so they say is the root of all evil today — Roger Waters

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 its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.. — Roger Waters

What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart? — Roger Waters

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark. — Roger Waters

What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? Oh, poems, no less! Poems, everybody! — Roger Waters

Did you see the frightened ones,
Did you hear the falling bombs,
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter in the promise of a brave new world unfurlled beaneath the clear blue skies.
Good bye blue skies. — Roger Waters

I confess I've never felt like a passenger. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

Would you like to watch TV or get between the sheets and contemplate this violent freeway, would you like something to eat would you like to learn to fly would ya, would you like to see me try — Roger Waters

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. — Roger Waters

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat? — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

For an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people's land and oppresses them, the way Israel does, is plain wrong. They should say no. — Roger Waters

I feel I have the potential to reach an audience beyond anything I can imagine. — Roger Waters

This is how you control your domestic population - by making people afraid and by identifying an enemy. — Roger Waters

Doctor Doctor what is wrong with me
This supermarket life is getting long
What is the heart life of a colour TV
What is the shelf life of a teenage queen — Roger Waters

That one record changed everything for me. After Sgt. Pepper, it's the most influential record in the history of rock and roll. It affected Pink Floyd deeply, deeply, deeply. Philosophically, other albums may have been more important, like Lennon's first solo album. But sonically, the way the record's constructed, I think Music from Big Pink is fundamental to everything that happened after it. — Roger Waters

There is a magic in some books That sucks a man into connections With the spirits hard to touch That join him to his kind. — Roger Waters

My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well. — Roger Waters

By the cold and religious we were taken in hand - shown how to feel good; and told to feel bad. — Roger Waters

Envy is the bond between the hopeful and the damned — Roger Waters

When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing. — Roger Waters

The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights or that there should be an international court of criminal justice. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

No dark sarcasm, in the classroom. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

And who knows which is which and who is who — Roger Waters

Can't you see it all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds shillings and pence, can't you see it all; makes perfect sense — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

I was faced with a choice: to deny my addiction and embrace that 'comfortably numb' but 'magicless' existence, or accept the burden of insight, take the road less travelled, and embark on the often painful journey to discover who I was and where I fit. — Roger Waters

In my rear view mirror the sun is going down sinking behind bridges in the road and I think of all the good things that we have left undone and I suffer premonitions confirm suspicions of the holocaust to come. — Roger Waters

CAN YOU FREE YOURSELF ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO EXPERIENCE THE REALITY OF LIFE AS IT GOES ON BEFORE YOU AND WITH YOU, AND AS YOU GO ON AS PART OF IT? OR NOT? BECAUSE IF YOU CAN'T YOU STAND ON SQUARE ONE, UNTIL YOU DIE. — Roger Waters

I found that the loudest fans in the world are in Istanbul. — Roger Waters

Everybody's got somewhere they call home. — Roger Waters

There are so many people out there who think they are fans of Pink Floyd - and certainly the work I did in Pink Floyd - who are still furious that I left. — Roger Waters

Life is long. But it goes fast. — Roger Waters

Ashes or diamonds
foe or friend
we're all equal in the end — Roger Waters

You run and you run to catch up to the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again. — Roger Waters

We're not ignored by The Guinness Book Of Records, but we've been largely ignored by the media during our lifetime. If you read any article, no mention is ever made of Pink Floyd. We're never included in the same sentences as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. I wrote 'The Wall' as an attack on stadium rock - and there's Pink Floyd making money out of it by playing it in stadiums! Pathetic. They spoiled my creations. — Roger Waters

You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else. — Roger Waters

Everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon — Roger Waters

And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death — Roger Waters

I don't feel as if I'm in competition with myself; not at all. — Roger Waters

We, the great American nation, decided that we've got 138 military bases around the world and we've now figured out that we can buy these drones from the Israelis, and we've decided that the way to proceed is to use this new technology to go and kill anybody that we don't like or who disagrees with us or who we might perceive as making an existential threat. — Roger Waters

You take the risk of being rejected. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters

Hanging on in Quiet Desperation is the English Way — Roger Waters

When we grew up and went to school There were certain teachers who would Hurt the children anyway they could By pouring their derision Upon anything we did And exposing every weakness However carefully hidden by the kids — Roger Waters

When you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else. — Roger Waters

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. — Roger Waters