Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

August Wilson
Age: 60 †
Born: 1945
Born: April 27
Died: 2005
Died: October 2
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Frederick August Kittel
Frederick August Kittel
Jr.
August Kittel
Ocean
Dragged
Tears
Float
Years
Floats
Cried
River
Rivers
Heavy
Across

More quotes by August Wilson

Image
I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.
August Wilson
Image
Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
August Wilson
Image
What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?
August Wilson
Image
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.
August Wilson
Image
You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
August Wilson
Image
Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
August Wilson
Image
I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write.
August Wilson
Image
Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.
August Wilson
Image
. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
August Wilson
Image
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
August Wilson
Image
Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.
August Wilson
Image
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
August Wilson
Image
I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
August Wilson
Image
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
Image
Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August Wilson
Image
I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.
August Wilson
Image
All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
August Wilson
Image
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
August Wilson
Image
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.
August Wilson
Image
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
August Wilson