August Wilson Quotes
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Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
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When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.
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When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
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The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.
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A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
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Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
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I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.
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The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.
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All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
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You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.
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I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.
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Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
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You are responsible for the world that you live in.
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Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
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My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
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If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
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Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
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I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.
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I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.
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As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he looks to white folks for approval . . . then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about.
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I write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.
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You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours.
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My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
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We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.
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I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't 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.
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I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.
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I've never seen 'Seinfeld', never seen 'The Cosby Show'; I just don't watch it. I saw half of 'Oprah' one time. I'd rather read.
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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.
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There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.
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You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
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