August Wilson Quotes
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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.
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I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.
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Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black.
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I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.
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Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.
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Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.
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Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.
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I do - very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, 'September Song.'
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In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
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From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
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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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I've seen some terrible plays, but I generally enjoy myself. One play I walked out of, I have a tremendous respect for the author. That was Robert Wilson, something called 'Network,' which consisted of Wilson sitting on a bunk, the dialogue of the movie 'Network' looped in while a chair on a rope went up and down.
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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.
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I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.
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From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays.
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If you want to participate in life, you have to deny your identity.
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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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I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also, I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.
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Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
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I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
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All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
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How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.
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I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.
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My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal.