Robert Wilson

“Chairs are like sculpture.”

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

“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.”

“If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.”

“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.”

“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?'”

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

“My work should be seen as poetry.”

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

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

“Most theater tells you what to think.”

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

“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 always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.”

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