Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life don't owe you nothing.
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
I don't write for a particular audience.
Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.
The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.
I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.
Anything you want to know, you ask the characters.
I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.
You are responsible for the world that you live in.
Land [is] the only thing God ain't making no more of.
Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal.
Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black.
Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.
If you want to participate in life, you have to deny your identity.
What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?
All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.
If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.
Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.
As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
I think of dying every day... At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.
I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.
I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write.
I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.
Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
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.
You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.
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.
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.
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.
There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.
I've never seen 'Seinfeld', never seen 'The Cosby Show'; I just don't watch it. I saw half of 'Oprah' one time. I'd rather read.
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.
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
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.
I dropped out of school when I was 15 years old. I dropped out because I guess I wasn't getting anything out of my investment in the school.
I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.
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.