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

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

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. Tha….

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

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

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

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,….

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

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 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….

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

I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write..

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..

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

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

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….

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….

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..