August Wilson

“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.”

“My hero when I was 14 was Sonny Liston. No matter what kinds of problems you were having with your parents or at school, whatever, Sonny Liston would go and knock guys out, and that made it all right.”

“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 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.”

“Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.”

“I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.”

“I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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