August Wilson Quotes
-
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
-
I had always been fascinated with Napoleon because he was a self-made emperor; Victor Hugo said, 'Napoleon's will to power,' and it was the title of my paper. And I submitted it to my teacher, and he didn't think I had written it. And he wanted me to explain it to him.
-
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.
-
I'm a De Niro fan. I went eleven years without seeing a movie; the last one before that, February 1980, was De Niro and Scorsese in 'Raging Bull,' and when I went back, it was 'Cape Fear,' with De Niro and Scorsese. I picked up right where I left off at.
-
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
-
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
-
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
-
I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.
-
Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.
-
We were what you would call a poor family, but we were rich in so many things. We did family things together. We always had dessert, even if it was just Jell-O. So, I never knew I was poor.
-
It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.
-
Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black.
-
I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.
-
Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.
-
I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.
-
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.
-
I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.
-
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
-
I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.
-
I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff, I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it.
-
I dropped out of school when I was 15 years old. I dropped out because I guess I wasn't getting anything out of my investment in the school.
-
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
-
Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.
-
I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.