Robert Wilson Quotations

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

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

My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.

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

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.

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

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?'

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.

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

To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'

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.

What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.

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

Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!

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 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.

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?

My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.

I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.

My work is formal, not based on psychology.

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

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?

On local issues, it is extremely important to run as an independent so that you can do what is right for the city rather than following a political agenda,

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad but not ill.

I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.

I got into paying attention to cities and when I moved downtown I would go into stores that were more mom and pop, so I would get to meet the people and talk to them, ... A lot of them pushed me and said I should run for council. Also, a lot of my old bosses said I should get into politics because I seem like a person who would care enough to do what is right.

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 always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

Hedonic Engineering -- The human nervous system studying and improving itself: intelligence studying and improving intelligence. Why be depressed, dumb, and agitated when you can be happy, smart, and tranquil?

My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.

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

I think that I've always been a kind of structured person.

I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.

I think that opera in Europe is 30 years ahead of America. There is a broader range of material presented to the public. They value contemporary opera.

I think it's just my nature. I can't work on one thing. I have to work on many things.

We have had an excellent response to our early recruitment activities which have attracted a wide selection of Macclesfield Town supporters from near and far. Although the majority of members come from Macclesfield itself, we have members from as far afield as London and Southampton. And we even have some international members from Norway, Denmark and Australia.

You just have no idea what it was like trying to get out of there,

We get pretty close to full each night.

. . . there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

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.

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.

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

When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.

There are many other studies, both clinical and non-clinical, that demonstrate homeopathy's efficacy and safety in many disease areas, ... Homeopathy has thrived and survived for over 250 years because of its excellent record of successful use and safety, which will ensure its continued use.

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

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

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

Counterpoint is difficult. I have been doing it since the beginning of my career. But it is not just taking any opposite. It is finding the right opposite.

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

The study has to be done. I'm happy to see (DOT) has come around and they've recognized that this is something that should be on the table.

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

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.

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.

Comparative advantage in the production of many of these requirements therefore lies outside China, with suppliers such as Rio Tinto.

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

I usually stay in on Sunday nights. I'm not much of a party person.

I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.

I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.

In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.

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

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

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

I met a 13-year-old black child, Raymond, who had never been to school and had never learnt any words, yet it seemed to me that he was intelligent. It became apparent after a short period that Raymond thought in terms of visual signs and movements.

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.

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.

All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: "Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. . . . Idealists regarded everybody equally corrupt, except themselves.

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

It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.

I had dinner with Marlene Dietrich in the early 1970s. I went to pick her up and she had someone with her, a dreadful man. He was writing a book about her, and he said to her, 'You're so cold when you perform,' and she said, 'You didn't listen to the voice.' She said the difficulty was to place the voice with the face.

In a business where you can't dictate price you need to be very good at what you can control, and that's cost,

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

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

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.

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

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

Sometimes, when we're very, very still, we're more aware of movement than when we make a lot of movement outwardly.

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.'

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

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.

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.'

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.

I don't see much difference between living and working. I think living is a part of my work. People often say, 'How can you work so much?' I don't think about it as work. I think of it as a way to live.

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.