August Wilson Quotes

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.
As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
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.
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.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 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.
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.
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
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.
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
Anything you want to know, you ask the characters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.
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.
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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AuthorName
August Wilson
Profession
Playwright
BirthDate
27 April, 1945
DeathDate
02 October, 2005
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