Top 40 Robert Wilson Quotes

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

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.

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.

Light is architectural. It is sculptural.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

My work should be seen as poetry.

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.’

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.

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

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

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

All theater is dance.

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.

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.

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’ve always thought abstractly – through theme and variations rather than narrative.

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

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.

I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.

The French, not the Americans, commissioned ‘Einstein on the Beach.’

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.

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

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

I want to work with Jay-Z.

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

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

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

The mind is a muscle.

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.

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.