Quote

What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?

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
Legacy
Use
Best

More quotes by August Wilson

Image
Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
August Wilson
Image
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
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
I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.
August Wilson
Image
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
Image
Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
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
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
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
You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
August Wilson
Image
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
Image
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
August Wilson
Image
Life don't owe you nothing.
August Wilson
Image
All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
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
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
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
My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
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
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