August Wilson Quotes & Sayings

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

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. — August Wilson

All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully. — August Wilson

Eli: Freedom is what you make it.

Solly: That's what I'm saying. You got to fight to make it mean something. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

ROSE: You can't be nobody but who you are, Cory. That shadow wasn't nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you. But that's all you got to make life with. That's all you got to measure yourself against that world out there. Your daddy wanted you to everything he wasn't...and at the same time he tried to make you into everything he was. I don't know if he was right or wrong...but I do know he meant to do more good than he meant to do harm. He wasn't always right. Sometimes when he touched he bruised. And sometimes when he took me in his arms he cut. — August Wilson

My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art. — August Wilson

I think the play offers (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things- love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives. — August Wilson

I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that. — August Wilson

I just want to come and sit on your front porch and drink mint juleps. — August Wilson

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

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. — August Wilson

What happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work. — August Wilson

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

The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology. — August Wilson

I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible ... — August Wilson

I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time. — August Wilson

Suffice it to say, I'm not poor. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone. — August Wilson

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information. — August Wilson

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

TROY: Death ain't nothing. I done seen him. Done wrasled with him. You can't tell me nothing about death. death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner. And you know what I'll do to that! Lookee here, Bono...am I lying? You get one of them fastballs, about waist high, over the outside corner of the plate where you can get the meat of the bat on it...and good god! You can kiss it goodbye. Now, am I lying? — August Wilson

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. — August Wilson

CORY: You ain't never gave me nothing! You ain't never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I was gonna be better than you. All you ever did was try and make me scared of you. I used to tremble every time you called my name. Every time I heard your footsteps in the house. Wondering all the time...what's Papa gonna say if I do this?...What's he gonna say if I do that?...What's Papa gonna say if I turn on the radio? And Mama, too...she tries...but she's scared of you. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

I hope this leads you to where you're going. — August Wilson

CORY: The whole time I was growing up...living in his house...Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and sunk into your flesh. It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn't tell which one was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me...hiding under the bed...in the closet. I'm just saying I've got to find a way to get rid of that shadow, Mama. — August Wilson

Life don't owe you nothing. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

I seen a man grab hold to a fellow and cut off his arm. Cut it off at the shoulder. He had to work at it a while...but he cut it clean off. The man looked down saw his arm gone and started crying. After that he more dangerous with that one arm than the other man is with two. He got less to lose. There's a lot of one-arm men walking around. — August Wilson

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

-How long you been with the rail road now?
-Twenty-seven years. Now, I'll tell you something about the railroad. What I done learned after twenty-seven years. See, you got North. You got West. You look over here you got South. Over there you got East. Now, you can start from anywhere. Don't care where you at. You got to go one of the four ways. And which way you decide to go, they got a railroad that will take you there. Now that's something simple. You think anybody would be able to understand that. But you'd be surprised how many people trying to go North get on a train going West. They think train's supposed to go where they going rather than where it's going. — August Wilson

Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy. — August Wilson

Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line
Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line
I ain't got no ticket please let me ride the blinds — August Wilson

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

You die how you live. — August Wilson

Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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 - — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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

ROSE: I married your daddy and settled down to cooking his super and keeping clean sheets on the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. For my part in the matter. But at that time I wanted that. I wanted a house that I could sing in. And that's what your daddy gave me. I didn't know to keep up his strength I had to give up little pieces of mine. I did that. I took on his life as mine and mixed up the pieces so that you couldn't hardly tell which was which anymore. It was my choice. It was my life and I didn't have to live it like that.But that's what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it. I grabbed hold of it with both hands. — August Wilson

Okay, Troy ... you're right. I'll take care of your baby for you ... cause ... like you say ... she's innocent ... and you can't visit the sins of the father upon the child. A motherless child has got a hard time. From right now ... this child got a mother. But you a womanless man. — August Wilson

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

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. — August Wilson

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

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. — August Wilson

You jumped but I'm falling too. — August Wilson

Why God got to be so big? Why he got to be bigger than me? — August Wilson

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

Everybody in a hurry to slow down. — August Wilson

Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money! — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

I give you sugar for sugar
And salt for salt
If you can't get along with me
It's your own damn fault. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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

I don't need nobody to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself. — August Wilson

Troy: Then when I saw that gal [Alberta] ... she firmed up my backbone. And I got to thinking that if I tried ... I just might be able to steal second. — August Wilson

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

Sometimes you're lucky and you don't even know it. — August Wilson

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave room for me. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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

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

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. — August Wilson

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

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet. — August Wilson

You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

You can put law on paper but that don't make it right. — August Wilson

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

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. — August Wilson

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is. — August Wilson

You right! You one hundred percent right! I done spent the last seventeen years worrying about what you got. Now it's your turn, see? I'll tell you what to do. You grown . . . we don established that. You a man. Now, let's see you act like one. Turn your behind around and walk out this yard. And when you get out there in the alley . . . you can forget about this house. See? Cause this is my house. You go on and be a man and get your own house. You can forget about this. You can forget about this. 'Cause this is mine. You go on and get yours because I'm through with doing for you. — August Wilson

Love don't know no age and it don't know no experience. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both. — August Wilson

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

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

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. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

Don't you think I ever wanted other things? Don't you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me. Don't you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good? You not the only one who's got wants and needs. But I held on to you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams ... and I buried them inside you. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn't take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn't never gonna bloom. — August Wilson

Aunt Ester: He didn't care if anybody else knew if he did or not. He knew. He didn't do it for the people standing around watching. He did it for himself. He say I'd rather die in truth than to live a lie. That way he can say that his life is worth more than a bucket of nails. What is your life worth, Mr. Citizen? That what you got to find out. You got to find a way to live in truth. If you live right you die right. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

A nigger that ain't afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man. He can't hold that power over you. That's what I learned when I killed that cat. I got the power of death too. — August Wilson

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. — August Wilson

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage. — August Wilson

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

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

We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are. — August Wilson

i love music more than food!!!!!!!!!! — August Wilson