Rodin, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, and among painters, Vermeer, Picasso, Manet and Monet, all the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt of course. As far as sculpture is concerned, I'm attracted to the sculptors who can create a plasticity in their work that approximates life, and no one does this better than Rodin who captures, sometimes shockingly, the relations between men and women; he certainly doesn't idealize the human body like Praxiteles but rather shows you that body in practical motion. And as far as the painter end, I prefer the painters who either through Symbolism or Pointillism or Impressionism give us a sense of the supernal forces behind reality, the poetry behind the apparent; that to me is the essence of great art: not to show the surface but what is behind the surface.
- Robert Brustein, Veery 1994 On the topic of his preference in visual artists
I wanted to be a musician at first. I was going to be Artie Shaw's successor as a swing band leader. He was my idol when I was about eight or nine when I took up the clarinet, went to the High School of Music and Art, and started my own band, and might have been a musician today if I hadn't sold my instruments for a girl I loved who was needy; I sold my clarinet and saxophone and sent her the money. - Robert Brustein, Veery 1994 On the subject of what interested him before as much as drama interests him now
Any number of them. 1979 and 1980 were tough years: I was in effect let go by the new president of Yale at that time after thirteen years, and I had to find a way to take this organism which I helped to create, called the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Yale School of Drama which I had not created but completely reformed, and find a way to keep the ideals and the aesthetic that were embodied in those two institutions still alive. And so I moved it north to Harvard and founded The American Repertory Theater and what's now called The Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. But those were tough years doing that; my wife died during the same year; and that combined with the geographical move and change of location and purpose made the years certainly difficult.
- Robert Brustein, Veery 1994 On the subject you having any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige
