A Quote by Robert Wilson

The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.' — © Robert Wilson
The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'
Americans and French are notoriously monolingual, especially earlier generations. Language is a sense of pride in both cultures. I think that the French and Americans are like brothers or sisters who are so similar that they irritate one another.
We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They're much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low - the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.
The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans - all of the other major powers - keep slavery. And the fact is that it's almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.
all the French speak French - even the children. Many Americans and Britishers who visit the country never quite adjust to this, and the idea persists that the natives speak the language just to show off or be difficult.
When African-Americans come to France, the French show them more consideration than they would show an African or a Black Caribbean. When African-Americans come to France, the French people are like, 'Oh, wow. Oh my God.' But if it's an African, they're like, 'Whatever.' It's all because of the past, because of our history.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.
Albert Einstein didn't care where he lived. Albert Einstein was a genius. Albert Einstein wasn't getting lost in the master bedroom, he was lost in thought.
When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
I think you jump into things without thinking ahead very much because I had never been in an airplane - even in a commercial airliner. I had never flown at all. I just wanted to be commissioned, to be a commissioned officer.
In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'
In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.
If Einstein was so smart how come people only call you 'Einstein' when you do something really stupid ?
I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.
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