Robert Wilson Quotes

I used to think 'King Lear' was an analysis of insanity, but I don't really think it is. When Lear is supposed to be at his most insane, he is actually understanding the world for the first time.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.

What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Greek tragedy was pre-Freudian, so every emotion has to be so raw; there are no psychological undertones.

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.

I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

I'm a tragedienne in some way. I think quite epically. I like epic landscapes and grand emotions.