Robert Wilson Quotes

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant.

Usually my starting point is something that I've seen. It might be a painting, it might be an object. But they always start from a definite sensory experience.

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

I first came across the script for 'Macbeth' between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.

I discovered the 7th art at home when I was kid, through Charlie Chaplin's movies and those of my father who shot documentaries. He was my biggest influence. So I took his camera and started shooting.

It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

I was inspired to make music since I was 7 because my aunt is a songwriter.

I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.

When I was 8 years old, I saw 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' in Charlotte, North Carolina. I walked out of there and was so inspired. I loved the movie, and I knew I wanted to be that guy.

More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.

There's a Diebenkorn painting - 'Ocean Park No. 68' - that is the color of a swimming pool and always reminds me of summers at the beach.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals, I feel the desire to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.

I think that the first film I saw in the theater was 'The AristoCats.' I was like, 'Oh my God, this is brilliant!' That's when I knew I wanted to work in cinema. I was four or five.

I get to go to so many different countries and hear so much music and collect totally different records. It's all very inspiring, and I'm trying to embrace that experience because not that many producers get to have that.

Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy.