August Wilson Quotes - Page 3

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.

Land [is] the only thing God ain't making no more of.

You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.

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.

I've never seen 'Seinfeld', never seen 'The Cosby Show'; I just don't watch it. I saw half of 'Oprah' one time. I'd rather read.

I done learned my mistake and learned to do what's right by it. You still trying to get something for nothing. Life don't owe you nothing. You owe it to yourself. - Troy -

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.

The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.

When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.

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.

I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.

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

Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.

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.

. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.

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.