August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilsonwas an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth27 April 1945
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
legacy use
What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?
attitude character play
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.
book needs
All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
life running responsibility
There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.
writing play black
. . . 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.
life
Life don't owe you nothing.
law say-anything matter
I don't go by what the law say. The law's liable to say anything. I go by if it's right or not. It don't matter what the law say. I take and look at it for myself.
thinking people black
I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.
thinking black literature
My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
black custodians situation
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
art live-life way
All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
writing responsibility artist
What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.
art writing cutting
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.
art political art-is
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.