Quotes by August Wilson
American society as a whole has a very short memory. There are a lot of things we don't know or have allowed ourselves to forget. I was visiting a high school, Seward High School, in 1987, and one of the students in the classroom thought that slavery had ended in 1960. He was very serious about it.
– August Wilson
I still don't know what works until it works, until I see it working. It wasn't through seeing other playwrights or reading other plays, because I haven't done much of either of those. Again, you have an intuitive sense that this is dramatic or a nice shape to a scene; you intuitively know how to tell a good story... where the highlights are, what information to withhold, and how to reveal things.
– August Wilson
I think that if I'm at home sitting doing the rewrite, I'm going to write something different than if I'm there in the rehearsal room doing it. It's kind of hard to explain, but if you're tossed into the fire at any particular moment, then you are going to write something different than you will in another particular moment. And that is from day to day.
– 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
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
Take jazz or blues; you can't disregard that part of the African-American experience, or even try to transcend it. They are affirmations and celebrations of the value and worth of the African-American spirit. And young people would do well to understand them as the roots of today's rap, rather than some antique to be tossed away.
– 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
When blacks made purchases in any store, they weren't given paper bags; instead, they had to carry out their purchases without a bag. If my mother had informed us of these things, it might have lessened her authoritarian presence in the world. Or, she might have come home one day to find me with hundreds of paper bags that I might have stolen somewhere.
– August Wilson
You have to make your own definition of yourself. That's crucial. When I do interviews, I am expected to become some sociologist. I have to speak to the condition of black America. My preference would be: Let's talk about theater. Let's talk about art. The fact that I am black is self-evident.
– August Wilson
You know, I find a very strong correlation between Kansas City and my native Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh had two fine Negro Leagues teams, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. And Pittsburgh was also a hotbed of jazz in the '30s and '40s-Lena Home, Billy Eckstein, Ahmad Jamal-we too had some very important musicians come out of Pittsburgh.
– August Wilson