Robert Wilson Quotes

I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.

When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.

I do still collect chairs.

They crossed the Mondego and Dao rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.

The chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.

When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.

By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?

The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.

I'm an artist, not a philosopher.

I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family, to the content of my work.

My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.

The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.

When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

I did a masterclass at the Juilliard and asked the students, 'Can you stand?' 'Sure.' 'Can you walk?' 'Sure.' They couldn't. They had never really thought about it.

Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside.

Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.

I think that in my plays you can come in for 20 minutes and get something out of it. I'd like to do a play that would run for days. I don't think time is that important. Nature doesn't hurry the sky, the changing clouds and sunsets.

There hasn't been a great romance in my life.

If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?

When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.

At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?

The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.

My work should be seen as poetry.

The portuguese never put anything behind them except a chair to eat lunch.

The first thing you must know as an actor or director is the space you will inhabit. See the architecture; imagine where things can happen in space.

I don't see anyone for the first hour and a half that I'm awake. I don't like to talk, and I don't like to hear any sounds. People know not to bother me! I use that time to read, and make lists and notes of things I have to do later in the day.

I collect rocks from all over the world. I have a ring of stones that date to 3500 B.C. It's like a little Stonehenge.

I want to work with Jay-Z.

I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but ... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'

I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.

I try to present something that is full of time. Not timeless, but full of time. I never like a work where we try to update it, but it's still not interesting to see a work that is dated. If one is successful, then a work can be full of time. And time is very complex.

I think mystery ... allows us time to dream.

All theater is dance.

I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.

There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.

Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.

The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.'

What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'

As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.

We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.

I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.

I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.

Yes, I've been in love, but I guess I'm too involved with myself and my work. I think I'm in love with my work, and I'm in love with the people I work with.

The mind is a muscle.

If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.