August Wilson Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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.

August Wilson
You cannot sit at home as a twenty-year-old poet. You don't know anything about life.

August Wilson
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

August Wilson
All I want is you to get out of my way. I got somewhere to go. See, everybody can't say that. Some people ain't got nowhere to go. They don't wanna go nowhere. If they wanted to go somewhere they would have been there.

August Wilson
Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

August Wilson
Negroes got blindyitis. A dog knows it's a dog. A cat knows it's a cat. But a Negro don't know he's a Negro. He thinks he's a white man.

August Wilson
Ain't nothing wrong with talking about death. That's part of life.

August Wilson
Life ain't shit. You can put it in a paper bag and carry it around with you. It ain't got no balls. Now death... death got some style! Death will kick your ass and make you wish you never been born! That's how bad death is! But you can rule over life. Life ain't nothing!

August Wilson
I took all my feelings, my wants and my needs, my dreams... and I buried them inside you. I planted a seed and watched and prayed over it. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom And it didn't take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn't never gonna bloom

August Wilson
They're tearing everything down around here. All along Wylie there. You see they done tore everything down. They gonna tear this building down.... We're gonna have to move. Either that or split up. We can't stay here no more.

August Wilson
The term black or African-American not only denotes race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory.

August Wilson
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
I ain't sorry for nothing I done. And I ain't gonna be sorry. I'm gonna see to that. 'Cause I'm gonna do the right thing. Always. It ain't in me to do nothing else. We might disagree about what that is. But I know what is right for me.

August Wilson
I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.

August Wilson
I come to this place... to this water that was bigger than the whole world. And I looked out... and I seen these bones rise up out of the water. Rise up and begin to walk on top of it.

August Wilson
You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.

August Wilson
Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.

August Wilson
You see, Mr. Caesar, you can put the law on the paper, but that don't make it right. That piece of paper say I was property. Say anybody could buy or sell me. The law say I need a piece of paper to say I was a free woman. But I didn't need no piece of paper to tell me that. Do you need a piece of paper, Mr. Caesar?

August Wilson
Aunt Esther give you more than money. She make you right with yourself. You ain't got to go far. She live at 1839 Wylie. In the back. Go up there and you'll see a red door. Go up there and knock on that.

August Wilson
That place where you live in your own special life... I would be happy to be big there.

August Wilson
It got so I used all of myself up in the making of that song. Then I was the song in search of itself. That song rattling in my throat and I'm looking for it.

August Wilson
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.

August Wilson
When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.

August Wilson
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.

August Wilson
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.

August Wilson
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.

August Wilson
I done learned my mistake and learned to do what's right by it. You still trying to get something for nothing. Life don't owe you nothing. You owe it to yourself. - Troy -

August Wilson
You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.

August Wilson
White folks don't understand the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.

August Wilson