A Quote by Robert Wilson
I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.
Related Quotes
I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.
I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer.
There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated.
I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power; [this is the central theme of John's Gospel:] When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that He Himself is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with legions but rather makes it visible through His Passion and thereby also implements it.
All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.
There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.
Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.
The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.
Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.
I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do.
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Group shows are always much harder to present to the public because there's a theme to the show. They always do less well because a theme is a harder thing for people to grapple with than a monographic idea.
What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.
I hope I'm able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I'm reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That's what I'd like to do.
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