I do still collect chairs.
— Robert Wilson
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.
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.
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.'
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 works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.
I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.
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.
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
My work should be seen as poetry.
My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
There hasn't been a great romance in my life.
I want to work with Jay-Z.
When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.
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.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
I'm an artist, not a philosopher.
Chairs are like sculpture.
I usually stay in on Sunday nights. I'm not much of a party person.
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.
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?
I think it's just my nature. I can't work on one thing. I have to work on many things.
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.
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
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.
All theater is dance.
Most theater tells you what to think.
I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.
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!
We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.
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.
It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.
I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.
The mind is a muscle.
In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.
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 start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.
I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.
I never thought about the relationship of my mother, my family, to the content of my work.
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.
I think mystery... allows us time to dream.
If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.
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.
Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.
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.
