August Wilson

“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”

“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.'”

“My first wife is a good woman, I still can't say nothing bad about her other than the fact that we had a difference on religion. She wanted someone who was a Muslim who shared those values. And I was like a heathen. I had to stay home on Sundays and watch the football game.”

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

“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also, I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.”

“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.”

“From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.”

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

“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.”

“Anything you want to know, you ask the characters.”

“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.”

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

“In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.”

“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.”

“Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.”

“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.”