August Wilson Quotes (50 Quotes)

It's not like poker You can't throw your hand in. I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready.

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.

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.

When you look at a fellow, if you taught yourself to look for it, you can see his song written on him. Tell you what kind of man he is in the world.

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.

I should take a page from my lawyer-every time I call, he's on vacation, four or five times a year.

assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years.

Walk in there. Tip my hat. Lay my money down on the table. Get my deed and walk on out. This time I get to keep all the cotton. Hire me some men to work it for me. Gin my cotton. Get my seed.

American society as a whole has a very short memory. There are a lot of things we don't know or have allowed ourselves to forget. I was visiting a high school, Seward High School, in 1987, and one of the students in the classroom thought that slavery had ended in 1960. He was very serious about it.

With the cycle done and Radio Golf ... a war between coffin makers and undertakers, Death taking a holiday, Queen Victoria and the Platters, Benny Goodman and a magic radio.

Writing has definitely been a refuge for me, something I needed to do in order to survive.

It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

Regardless of the medium, rewriting and more rewriting is still necessary. No one gets anything right the first time, and since I don't write with a hammer and chisel, it's relatively easy for me to change. It's just words on paper. Words are free. You don't go to the store and order a pound of words, or five hundred words, and pay your three dollars. They're free.

I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.

The way I see it, the stage tells the story for the ear, and the screen for the eye... On stage, you can't really control where the viewer's eye goes there's a whole stage picture there, and the viewer can be looking anywhere. But with the camera, if you want the viewer to look at something in particular, you can put their eye there.

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.

Some are from deeper inside than others, but they're all different aspects of my personality, I suspect. They're not modeled after anyone that I know. They are voices of the black community.

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

Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher sho

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 God's closet.

I have to confess that I'm not a big movie person. I don't go to a lot of films. And I don't know very much about the history of stage-to-film adaptations.

Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

The end to the measure and meaning of my life.

I might be a different kind of fool, but I ain't gonna be the same fool twice.

When blacks made purchases in any store, they weren't 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.

He paused. ''But what if they say they're going to cut off the heads of my children If it's just me, that's OK, but not my children.

I need a woman that fits in my hand.

Take jazz or blues you can't 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 today's rap, rather than some antique to be tossed away.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

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.

I still don't know what works until it works, until I see it working. It wasn't through seeing other playwrights or reading other plays, because I haven't 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.

I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.

My plays are talky I say shut up and listen. They are about black men talking, and in American society you don't too often have that because the feeling is 'What do black men have to say'

You look up one day and you hate the whiskey, and you hate the women, and you hate the piano. But that's all you got. You can't do nothing else. All you know how to do is play that piano. Now, who am I Am I me Or am I the piano player

Many is the time I looked at my daddy and seen him staring off at his hands. I got a little older I know what he was thinking. He sitting there saying, I got these big old hands but what I'm gonna do with them

Wilson may never see the marquee or sit in the theater that carries his name. Last month, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he announced that he was dying of liver cancer, with three to five months to live. He disclosed it with the type of plainspoken grit one of his heroic characters might admire. I've lived a blessed life, ... I'm ready.

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.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. 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, which is the blues. And we forget it all.

Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.

I think it is an extraordinary honor, and it is truly a capstone of my career. I am overwhelmed.

To my observation, the black middle class has failed to return the expertise and sophistication and resources that they've gained in American society over the past 50 years back to the community,

I have a robust imagination and I have imagined for myself many things,

She's just using him to keep from being by herself. That's the worst use of a man you can have.

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

I don't have a musical background. But I do enjoy all kinds of music. It's an expression of the human spirit that illuminates our humanity.

Reviewing the play's Broadway premiere for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that in Ma Rainey, ... sends the entire history of black America crashing down upon our heads.

You have to make your own definition of yourself. That's 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 Let's talk about theater. Let's talk about art. The fact that I am black is self-evident.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world -- the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere.