August Wilson

Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

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.

I do - very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, 'September Song.'

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.

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 art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

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

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.

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

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff, I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.