Robert Wilson Quotes

I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

People were nicer to me when I was in the arts. I experienced extreme racism in small-town New Zealand. Racism which really went away when I got into the arts.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

I will say that the environment I grew up in was not the most progressive.

I grew up in a very small town in Massachusetts, and it goes without saying that there weren't many Nigerian families in that town, and a lot of people couldn't say Uzoamaka.

Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that's available.

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.

The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for the Arts. The whole culture in society has made certain films more acceptable. I turned down so many films in the '60s and '70s.

I just get the feeling that if Jesse Helms was in charge of art in America, you'd go into a museum and see nothing but prints of dogs playing cards.

I come from extremely liberal people, one of only 20 in Texas where I grew up.

Evil people! They are so fearful of traditional, conservative religion in America. These people are bad for the future of America.

You go back to my town, it's like going back to the 1960s... just not a great place to grow up.

The very act of saying anything more nuanced than 'us good, them bad' is under attack, and I'm proud to stand with artists who do.

The second you feel a political imperative, it destroys your art.

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

I grew up in a town with just under three hundred people in Western Australia. When you think about being six hours outside the second most isolated city in the world, which is Perth, and then you think about the town that I'm from, which is called Southern Cross, acting is not a possibility.

There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they've never heard a piano or seen a piano.