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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

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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
Social
Clubs
School
Neighbor
Government
Fellows
Live
Responsible
Singularly
World
Citizens
Utterly
Path
Citizen
Responsibility
Club
Church
Fellow

More quotes by 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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I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.
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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I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.
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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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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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.
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 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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Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.
August Wilson
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All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
August Wilson
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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
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All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
August Wilson
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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
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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.
August Wilson
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All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
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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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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I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.
August Wilson
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. . . 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