August Wilson

I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.
-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For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.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

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
-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. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
-August Wilson

It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.
-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

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. 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, which is the blues. And we forget it all.
-August Wilson

Regardless of the medium, rewriting and more rewriting is still necessary. No one gets anything right the first time, and since I don't write with a hammer and chisel, it's relatively easy for me to change. It's just words on paper. Words are free. You don't go to the store and order a pound of words, or five hundred words, and pay your three dollars. They're free.
-August Wilson

I might be a different kind of fool, but I ain't gonna be the same fool twice.
-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

You can only close if you opened.
-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

The way I see it, the stage tells the story for the ear, and the screen for the eye... On stage, you can't really control where the viewer's eye goes; there's a whole stage picture there, and the viewer can be looking anywhere. But with the camera, if you want the viewer to look at something in particular, you can put their eye there.
-August Wilson