Quotes by August Wilson

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.”

“It aint nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.”

“Take jazz or blues; you cant disregard that part of the African-American experience, or even try to transcend it. They are affirmations and celebrations of the value and worth of the African-American spirit. And young people would do well to understand them as the roots of todays rap, rather than some antique to be tossed away.”

“All you need in the world is love and laughter. Thats all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.”

“Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. Thats the wrong move. If you cant be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, which is the blues. And we forget it all.”

“I have to confess that Im not a big movie person. I dont go to a lot of films. And I dont know very much about the history of stage-to-film adaptations.”

“Style aint nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.”

“The harder you try to hold onto them, the easier it is for some gal to pull them away.”

“Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... Its the attitude thats in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.”

“Im trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that cant be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.”

“I dont have a musical background. But I do enjoy all kinds of music. Its an expression of the human spirit that illuminates our humanity.”

“I think that if Im at home sitting doing the rewrite, Im going to write something different than if Im there in the rehearsal room doing it. Its kind of hard to explain, but if youre tossed into the fire at any particular moment, then you are going to write something different than you will in another particular moment. And that is from day to day.”

“You have to make your own definition of yourself. Thats crucial. When I do interviews, I am expected to become some sociologist. I have to speak to the condition of black America. My preference would be: Lets talk about theater. Lets talk about art. The fact that I am black is self-evident.”

“I feel sort of embarrassed I dont go to plays, but I cant keep the characters straight. I feel I should be somewhere else.”

“When blacks made purchases in any store, they werent given paper bags; instead, they had to carry out their purchases without a bag. If my mother had informed us of these things, it might have lessened her authoritarian presence in the world. Or, she might have come home one day to find me with hundreds of paper bags that I might have stolen somewhere.”

“What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as Gods closet.”

“I still dont know what works until it works, until I see it working. It wasnt through seeing other playwrights or reading other plays, because I havent done much of either of those. Again, you have an intuitive sense that this is dramatic or a nice shape to a scene; you intuitively know how to tell a good story... where the highlights are, what information to withhold, and how to reveal things.”

“Theres no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.”

“I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.”

“For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.”