Robert Wilson

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

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

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

When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.

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

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

The mind is a muscle.

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.

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

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?'

Most theater tells you what to think.

All theater is dance.

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.

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.

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

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'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Chairs are like sculpture.

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

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

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.

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.

My work should be seen as poetry.

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.

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.'

Light is architectural. It is sculptural.

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.

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.

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.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

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 always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.