Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.
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.
The landscape of Texas is in all my work. It's that light; it's that sky.
Light is architectural. It is sculptural.
If you take a Baroque commode and put a Baroque clock on top of it, maybe it is not so interesting as when you put a computer on top of it. Then you see both items in a new way.
By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
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.
My work has always dealt with a kind of space that allows one to daydream.
There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!'
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.
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 grew up in a town where there were no galleries, no museums, no theaters - a very religious, ultraconservative community.
My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
I don't see anyone for the first hour and a half that I'm awake. I don't like to talk, and I don't like to hear any sounds. People know not to bother me! I use that time to read, and make lists and notes of things I have to do later in the day.
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.
When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.
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.
