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" I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it. "

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

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

" 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?' "

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

" I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment. "

" 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. "

" The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.' "

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

Change The World

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity. "

" I think that I've always been a kind of structured person. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed. "

" Light is architectural. It is sculptural. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Chairs are like sculpture. "