Syd Barrett

Sourced

• I'm full of dust and guitars…
  • Rolling Stone, December 1971

• All middle men are bad.
  • Melody Maker, 1967-12-09

• I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway.
  • Rolling Stone, December 1971

• And what exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke?
  • Jugband Blues

• It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here, and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here.
  • Jugband Blues

• Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter…I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done…But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.
  • Melody Maker, March 1971

• That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.
  • Rolling Stone, December 1971

• Well, I've got a colour telly, and a fridge. I've got some pork chops in the fridge, but the chops keep going off, so I have to keep buying more.
  • In response to being asked by David Gilmour what he was up to lately during an unexpected reunion in 1975, as written in Nick Mason's Inside Out

• We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.
  • Melody Maker, 1967-12-09

Unsourced

• Apart from being a good guitarist, I don't really have any ambition.

• Really, we have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined; we think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene, one enhances and adds to the other. We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show. Melody Maker, 1967-12-09

• I'm Sorry, I Don't Speak French

• I'm going far further than you could ever possibly imagine.
  • His reply when asked by a former friend where he was going as he walked down London's Oxford Street, circa 1970.

• All we can do is make records which we like. If the kids don't, then they won't buy it.

• I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time. I swapped it for the black one, but I've never played it.

• Well, I think of me being a painter eventually…

• Yeah…that's nice. Well, I've only got an electric. I've got a black Fender which needs replacing. I haven't got any blue jeans…I really prefer electric music.

• The guy who lives next door to me paints, and he's doing it well, so I don't really feel the need.

• I like to do the words and music simultaneously, so when I go into the studio I've got the words on one side and my music on the other. I suppose I could do with some practice.

About Syd Barrett

• Syd was so beautiful with his violet eyes. I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke. He would just tolerate me because I was so overpowered, so in awe that I didn't really speak either. I only hung around him for two or three weeks just before he flipped and was virtually removed from the group. I knew Syd was wonderful because he wrote such wonderful songs. He didn't have to speak because the fact that he couldn't speak made him who he was: this person who wrote these mysterious songs. I just liked looking at him: he was very pretty. A lot of the time with pop stars, when they open their mouths, it was all completely ruined anyway. So it was perfect that he was like that. My first pop star and it was just wonderful that he didn't speak.
  • Jenny Fabian, Groupie (1969)

• It's sad that these people think he's such a wonderful subject, that he's a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can't deal with life or himself. He's got uncontrollable things in him that he can't deal with and people think it's a marvellous, wonderful, romantic thing. It's just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who's just disintegrated.
  • David Gilmour, Musician Magazine (December 1982)

• Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968.
  • Roger Waters, interviewed on Australian radio (1988)

• If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark.
  • Bob Klose, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (2003)