Top 94 August Wilson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.
August Wilson
#4. I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.
August Wilson
#5. I had always been fascinated with Napoleon because he was a self-made emperor; Victor Hugo said, 'Napoleon's will to power,' and it was the title of my paper. And I submitted it to my teacher, and he didn't think I had written it. And he wanted me to explain it to him.
August Wilson
#6. 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
#8. You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.
August Wilson
#9. The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.
August Wilson
#10. 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
#12. Love don't know no age and it don't know no experience.
August Wilson
#13. 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
#15. All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
August Wilson
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
August Wilson
#20. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
August Wilson
#21. I don't go by what the law say. The law's liable to say anything. I go by if it's right or not. It don't matter what the law say. I take and look at it for myself.
August Wilson
#23. I just want to come and sit on your front porch and drink mint juleps.
August Wilson
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.
August Wilson
#28. I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible ...
August Wilson
#29. 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
#30. I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.
August Wilson
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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.
August Wilson
#35. All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
August Wilson
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
August Wilson
#40. Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
August Wilson
#41. What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?
August Wilson
#42. You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.
August Wilson
#43. 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
#44. Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
August Wilson
#45. Some people carry their luck with them and people got to find it.
August Wilson
#46. Why God got to be so big? Why he got to be bigger than me?
August Wilson
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Sometimes you find bad luck and good luck in the same place.
August Wilson
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
August Wilson
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
August Wilson
#59. 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
#60. You should have held me tight. You should have grabbed me and held on.
August Wilson
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
August Wilson
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.
August Wilson
#69. I don't need nobody to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself.
August Wilson
#70. 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
#71. Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August Wilson
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
August Wilson
#76. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
August Wilson
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
August Wilson
#80. Sometimes you're lucky and you don't even know it.
August Wilson
#81. 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
#82. I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.
August Wilson
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. You can't visit the sins of the father upon the child.
August Wilson
#87. 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
#88. As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
August Wilson
#89. Land [is] the only thing God ain't making no more of.
August Wilson
#90. 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
#91. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
August Wilson
#92. You can put law on paper but that don't make it right.
August Wilson
#93. 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
#94. Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!
August Wilson
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