Robert Wilson

“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 w...”

“I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.”

“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?”

“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 aw...”

“It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.”

“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,...”

“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 h...”

“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 postmode...”

“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 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 th...”

“As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.”

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

“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...”

“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...”

“I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.”