August Wilson Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.

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

What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?

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

I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.

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

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.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

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. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.

I don't write for a particular audience.

Life don't owe you nothing.

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

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

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

I don't go by what the law say. The law's liable to say anything. I go by if it's right or not. It don't matter what the law say. I take and look at it for myself.

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

You are responsible for the world that you live in.

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 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 ain't never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

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.

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

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

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

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 to yourself. - Troy -

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

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.

When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.

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

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.

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

Sometimes you find bad luck and good luck in the same place.

Don't you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you.

You can't visit the sins of the father upon the child.

Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the linePlease, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the lineI ain't got no ticket please let me ride the blinds

Some people carry their luck with them and people got to find it.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.