August Wilson Quotes

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August Wilson

Profession : Playwright

Birth : April 27, 1945

I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff, I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it.

August Wilson

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

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

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

I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.

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For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.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

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

Like most people, I have this sort of love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh. This is my home, and at times I miss it and find it tremendously exciting, and other times I want to catch the first thing out that has wheels.

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

I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.

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

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

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

How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.

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

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.

August Wilson

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

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