Top 33 August Wilson Quotes

With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.

Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It’s hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.

From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays.

Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you’re black.

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 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.

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

I’ve seen some terrible plays, but I generally enjoy myself. One play I walked out of, I have a tremendous respect for the author. That was Robert Wilson, something called ‘Network,’ which consisted of Wilson sitting on a bunk, the dialogue of the movie ‘Network’ looped in while a chair on a rope went up and down.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

I’m a De Niro fan. I went eleven years without seeing a movie; the last one before that, February 1980, was De Niro and Scorsese in ‘Raging Bull,’ and when I went back, it was ‘Cape Fear,’ with De Niro and Scorsese. I picked up right where I left off at.

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

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

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.

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 for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

I’ve never seen ‘Seinfeld’, never seen ‘The Cosby Show’; I just don’t watch it. I saw half of ‘Oprah’ one time. I’d rather read.

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.

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.’

We were what you would call a poor family, but we were rich in so many things. We did family things together. We always had dessert, even if it was just Jell-O. So, I never knew I was poor.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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.

I think of dying every day… At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka’s plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.

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

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 try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.

I didn’t always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.