Quotes from August Wilson

They say they needed that. Say the colored man got a right to life. Say they was fighting against slavery. I asked them what took them so long. My daddy fought against slavery all his life. (...) They was real serious about it. I knew all them guns wasn't on account of me. I figure they was fighting for themselves. And if that would help them that would help us.

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 Largeness and Laws. —August Wilson

I still write poetry and think it is the highest form of literature." —

The whole time I was growing up...living in this house...Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. ...It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn't tell which one was you anymore.

Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.

HEDLEY: He would not call me King. He laughed to think a black man could be King. I did not want to lose my name, so I told him to call me the name my father gave me, and he laugh. He would not call me King, and I beat him hard with a stick.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal.

From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.

I don't write for a particular audience. 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.

I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.

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.

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.

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.

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.

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.

How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.

In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.

I dropped out of school when I was 15 years old. I dropped out because I guess I wasn't getting anything out of my investment in the school.

My hero when I was 14 was Sonny Liston. No matter what kinds of problems you were having with your parents or at school, whatever, Sonny Liston would go and knock guys out, and that made it all right.

I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.

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.

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

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.