August Wilson Quotes - Page 2

Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.

There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

You are responsible for the world that you live in.

I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.

Life don't owe you nothing.

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

I don't go by what the law say. The law's liable to say anything. I go by if it's right or not. It don't matter what the law say. I take and look at it for myself.

All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.

As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he looks to white folks for approval . . . then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about.

The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

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.

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

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.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.

So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.

We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.

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

I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write.

I don't write for a particular audience.

I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.