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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.
August Wilson -
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
August Wilson
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With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.
August Wilson -
Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.
August Wilson -
I don't write for a particular audience.
August Wilson -
In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.
August Wilson -
If you want to participate in life, you have to deny your identity.
August Wilson -
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.
August Wilson
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I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
August Wilson -
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
August Wilson -
Anything you want to know, you ask the characters.
August Wilson -
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.
August Wilson -
My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal.
August Wilson