George C. Wolfe

“In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.”

“I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.”

“I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.”

“At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.”

“The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.”

“'You Gotta Have Heart' is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.”

“My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.”

“A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.”

“The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.”

“When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.”

“Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.”

“Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.”

“'Jelly,' more than any black musical before it, celebrated the majesty, the purity, the joy of so many artists who are unable to fully embody these same qualities in their own lives.”

“The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.”

“I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from.”

“I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'”

“If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.”

“There's no place more theatrical than history.”

“I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.”

“When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.”