Because we never stop silently loving those who we once loved out loud.
When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.
True love for whatever you are doing is the answer to everything.
I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.
I just want to create situations where people forget time.
Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now.
Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.
People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It’s because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can’t; it’s impossible.
I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.
It’s very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something – like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child – and if you don’t follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I’m naked.
From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the ’70s, the general attitude – not just me, but also my colleagues – was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.
All my inspiration comes from life. That’s how it never stops, in a way.
To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.
You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important – in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
Art comes from life, not from the studio.
Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.