Quotes from Suzan-Lori Parks

The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

Being a playwright of any race is difficult, and Lord knows it gets more difficult the further you get from the middle of the road. I don't know what kind of magic my mojo is working, but it's working.

The writing of 'Topdog' was a great gift. I feel the play came to me because I realized that my circumstances, while causing me despair and heartbreak, also held great possibility, if only I could see it.

Someone yelled at me once, 'You never write about yourself.' People used to get so mad at me for that. But my definition of myself is completely up for grabs. I'm everywhere, just like we all are.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

I knew that I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life: that instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity, I should work toward a realization that every opportunity is perfect.

And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road.

One could get locked in by the Pulitzer, thinking, 'This is who I am.' Doors open with it, but doors in your mind could close.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

Each moment is perfect and heaven-sent, in that each moment holds the seeds for growth.

I don't read reviews. I refuse to have my ego inflated or deflated by someone I don't know.

Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.

I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.

And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road.

you're only yourself when no ones watching!

The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.

History is time that won't quit.

Overweight southern senators are easy targets. They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to willfully ignore our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which--evil senators or no--will be the death of the arts.

I'm gonna take your mother back to Lincoln," I says. "I'm gonna get her a new coffin, a nice one, and a nice angel headstone. I'll put her in the ground real good and all at my expense." I expect Billy to smile or say thank you or something but she is looking hard at the wrapped quilt, thinking. There's a part of the dress, just a little bit of the hem

He sported this style in the early war years. Years of uncertainty. When he didn't know if the war was right when it could be said he didn't always know which side he was on not because he was a stupid man but because it was sometimes not 2 different sides at all but one great side surging toward something beyond either Northern or Southern.

The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.

I don't consciously start writing a play that involves issues. After it's done, I sit back like everyone else and think about what it means.