197 Quotes by August Wilson

I think it is an extraordinary honor, and it is truly a capstone of my career. I am overwhelmed.

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

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.

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.

My plays are talky; I say shut up and listen. They are about black men talking, and in American society you don't too often have that because the feeling is: 'What do black men have to say?'

I'm standing! I'm standing! My legs stood up!

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

We are running out of energy, mental energy, ... We need to generate something new, for ourselves.

You look up one day and you hate the whiskey, and you hate the women, and you hate the piano. But that's all you got. You can't do nothing else. All you know how to do is play that piano. Now, who am I? Am I me? Or am I the piano player?