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" One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Change The World

" Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do! "

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

" I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making. "

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

" I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed. "

" I do still collect chairs. "

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

" I collect rocks from all over the world. I have a ring of stones that date to 3500 B.C. It's like a little Stonehenge. "

" 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 one is successful, then a work can be full of time. And time is very complex. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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.' "

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

" There hasn't been a great romance in my life. "

" Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera. "

" 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.' "

" 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? "

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

" My work should be seen as poetry. "

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