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
My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.
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?'
I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.
The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.
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.
If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before.
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 think that I've always been a kind of structured person.
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'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.
Sometimes, when we're very, very still, we're more aware of movement than when we make a lot of movement outwardly.
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.
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 people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.
The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.
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.
When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
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.
My work is formal, not based on psychology.
My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.
In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.
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 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?
I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
I grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'
Light is architectural. It is sculptural.
