I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible..

Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up..

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

Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cau….

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make a….

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..

All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully..

You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your chur….

Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief..

You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else..

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..

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet..

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

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

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….

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is..

You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger..

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

I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry,….

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..

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….