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

August Wilson

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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
Anybody
Else
Right

More quotes by August Wilson

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Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
August Wilson
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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.
August Wilson
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Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
August Wilson
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I dont write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but thats not why I write.
August Wilson
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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
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My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
August Wilson
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I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.
August Wilson
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You are responsible for the world that you live in.
August Wilson
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Life don't owe you nothing.
August Wilson
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I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
August Wilson
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When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
August Wilson
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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
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Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August Wilson
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Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
August Wilson
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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
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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
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I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am that's who I write about.
August Wilson
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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
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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
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You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours.
August Wilson