Roy Harper Quotations

When I was 15, I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.

I'd just like to prove to myself that I'm all here and all together and can get the best out of myself. I'd also like to prove that to a couple of other people.

I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

I was determined if I was going to become a superstar it would be on my terms. I've had that ethic since the beginning.

Remember, this was a world that was still ethnically separated. I was thirteen and ignorant of the social situation in America, but I felt these records were better than what my own culture was turning out.

I was never really a bone fide member of the folk scene.

When you look at a Hogarth painting or a Picasso, they didn't take any notice of the mores and constraints of their age: they went and did something that they wanted to do. That's how I see myself.

What is our destiny? Does it matter? Is it bound up with 'our' planet? In my opinion, yes.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

As soon as I heard skiffle, I loved it and I knew that I wanted to play it.

Don't shift because fashion has shifted. Don't move from the original ethic you had, the original reasons. They're part and parcel of you.

I've seen such things as you would not believe. I've seen motorbikes driven down hotel corridors - and had a go myself.

I've taken a stand against religion for as long I've been able to write and think.

I've never known anything but emotional turmoil... I go from day to day in a kind of frenzied state. I can't wait to do this, that and the other.

I've listened to a lot of music, and I reckon that my records are definitely better, more stimulating, and more carefully constructed than any others. I've studied the melodies and lyrical forms of many artists, but no-one else quite seems to sustain the burning intensity of my own work.

I've never bothered much about the past, I'm always in the middle of the next step and so the past is really scattered.

I've always had a 'take it or leave it' attitude to fame; I'm much more interested in what I'm doing, rather than in anything like that.

As a really young child, I was listening to the echoes of the age before, music hall and stuff like that, as well as classical bits on the radio.

As a revolutionary and leader of people at the barricades, I failed. But as a person who inwardly revolts all the time, I'm a raging success.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

They showed me this album sleeve, the new Led Zeppelin album, and I said 'very nice' and handed it back. 'No, go on - look again' they said, and then I saw this song 'Hats off to Harper'. It was very, uh... to be honest, it's been more of a burden than anything. A hell of a thing to live up to.

It's fantastic to put your hands in the earth. I enjoy spending my time in heaven here. I don't care what you say, this is my heaven.

I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

In a lot of the things I write, I aim for timelessness. It's not really that hard to do. When you've got something in your mind you have to impart, you're not thinking about Madonna or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bryan Adams or anyone who inhabits the popularized world.

I'm careful, controlled, bodily conservative: if someone offered me a pill I'd only ever take a half.

I'm attending to my legacy, making sure that it travels the universe in the best shape I can get it into. For as long as I'm alive, I'll still be its interpreter.

If humanity was still in the feral state, we wouldn't have any need for these huge conurbations that we have now, that have turned us into a different bunch all together. In the feral state we would be much more secure, much more familiar with each other, much more mentally well-balanced.

Id just like to prove to myself that Im all here and all together and can get the best out of myself. Id also like to prove that to a couple of other people.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

I regret that I've never actually managed to be inspired enough to get into anything else, and I should've been, I really should have been, because the piano can be a wonderful instrument. But I'm afraid that my inspiration is just purely on the words... and it's gonna stay there.

I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.

What I lack in height, I make up for in wicked good hearing.

In some ways, I lament the introduction of civilisation on such a huge scale, because it has given us a lot of room to abuse each other, which we continue to do.