Robert Wilson On Directing Theater Via Silence

“Today if I’m directing The Ring of Wagner, Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Threepenny Opera, I still start directing the work silently. … That means Brünnhilde will stand in one position for five minutes where she will later be singing, so she begins to understand what it’s like in terms of the physicality of doing the role and what the visual image is like. We begin to listen to the silences and how they are structured, and later I add text and music.”

Why This Is The Best Of Times For Publishing

“Anything good that happens, any genuine excitement that a book elicits can be amplified and repeated and streamed and forwarded and linked in a way that excitement spreads more quickly and universally than ever before. And what I’m seeing is that really wonderful books — the books that people get genuinely excited about because they change their lives, they give them new ideas — those books can travel faster, go further, sell more copies sooner than ever before.”