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" If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message? "

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" 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 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. "

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

" If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn't seen before. "

" 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.' "

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

" We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go. "

" 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'm an artist, not a philosopher. "

" 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?' "

" If we lose our culture, we lose our memory. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" I think mystery... allows us time to dream. "

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

" My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions. "

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

" When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies. "

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

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

" 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. "

" When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art. "

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

Change The World

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "