Top 80 Robert Wilson Quotes
#1. My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
Robert Wilson
#2. Sometimes, when we're very, very still, we're more aware of movement than when we make a lot of movement outwardly.
Robert Wilson
#3. 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.
Robert Wilson
#4. The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.
Robert Wilson
#5. 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.'
Robert Wilson
#6. If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?
Robert Wilson
#8. 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.
Robert Wilson
#9. 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.
Robert Wilson
#11. 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.
Robert Wilson
#12. I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.
Robert Wilson
#13. There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'
Robert Wilson
#14. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
Robert Wilson
#15. In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.
Robert Wilson
#16. 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.
Robert Wilson
#17. 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.
Robert Wilson
#18. I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.
Robert Wilson
#19. The chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.
Robert Wilson
#20. I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.
Robert Wilson
#21. I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
Robert Wilson
#22. They crossed the Mondego and Dao rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria.
Robert Wilson
#23. 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.
Robert Wilson
#24. 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.
Robert Wilson
#25. 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.
Robert Wilson
#26. I think it's just my nature. I can't work on one thing. I have to work on many things.
Robert Wilson
#27. The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
Robert Wilson
#28. 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.
Robert Wilson
#30. I think that I've always been a kind of structured person.
Robert Wilson
#31. 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.
Robert Wilson
#33. I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family, to the content of my work.
Robert Wilson
#34. I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.
Robert Wilson
#35. The portuguese never put anything behind them except a chair to eat lunch.
Robert Wilson
#36. Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.
Robert Wilson
#37. 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.
Robert Wilson
#38. 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.
Robert Wilson
#39. In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.
Robert Wilson
#40. 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?'
Robert Wilson
#41. 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.
Robert Wilson
#42. 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.
Robert Wilson
#43. It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.
Robert Wilson
#44. When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
Robert Wilson
#47. I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
Robert Wilson
#48. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Robert Wilson
#50. My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.
Robert Wilson
#51. When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.
Robert Wilson
#52. 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.
Robert Wilson
#53. 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!
Robert Wilson
#54. I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.
Robert Wilson
#55. When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.
Robert Wilson
#56. As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.
Robert Wilson
#57. 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.
Robert Wilson
#58. I usually stay in on Sunday nights. I'm not much of a party person.
Robert Wilson
#60. My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.
Robert Wilson
#61. If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.
Robert Wilson
#62. 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.
Robert Wilson
#66. I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.
Robert Wilson
#67. The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.
Robert Wilson
#68. 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.
Robert Wilson
#69. I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.
Robert Wilson
#70. 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.
Robert Wilson
#71. 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?
Robert Wilson
#72. I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.
Robert Wilson
#73. 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?'
Robert Wilson
#74. Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.
Robert Wilson
#76. 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.
Robert Wilson
#78. We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.
Robert Wilson
#79. 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?
Robert Wilson
#80. 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.'
Robert Wilson
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