My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship - the idea that black people are from outer space, there's a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.

Overweight southern senators are easy targets. They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to willfully ignore our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which – evil senators or no – will be the death of the arts.

History is time that won’t quit.

I’m gonna take your mother back to Lincoln,” I says. “I’m gonna get her a new coffin, a nice one, and a nice angel headstone. I’ll put her in the ground real good and all at my expense.” I expect Billy to smile or say thank you or something but she is looking hard at the wrapped quilt, thinking. There’s a part of the dress, just a little bit of the hem.

My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship – the idea that black people are from outer space, theres a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.

I love beautiful black-and-white movies – anything Bette Davis, especially Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich.

I don’t consciously start writing a play that involves issues. After it’s done, I sit back like everyone else and think about what it means.

Quality is like quantity, but there’s a lot less of it.

Be bold. Envision yourself living a life that you love. Believe, even if you can only muster your faith for just this moment, believe that the sort of life you wish to live is, at this very moment, just waiting for you to summon it up. And when you wish for it, you begin moving toward it, and it, in turn, begins moving toward you.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.