197 Quotes by August Wilson

With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. 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, and that is the blues.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

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.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

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.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.

Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka's plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.