"We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are."
Quote collection
August Wilson quotes (page 3 of 4)
67 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible."
"Land [is] the only thing God ain't making no more of."
"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."
"All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything."
"If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes."
"As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he looks to white folks for approval . . . then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about."
"You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say."
"The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information."
"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."