August Wilson Lack Quotations

. . . 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.

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.

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.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

My plays are talky; I say shut up and listen. They are about black men talking, and in American society you don't too often have that because the feeling is: 'What do black men have to say?'

Some are from deeper inside than others, but they're all different aspects of my personality, I suspect. They're not modeled after anyone that I know. They are voices of the black community.

I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

When blacks made purchases in any store, they weren't given paper bags; instead, they had to carry out their purchases without a bag. If my mother had informed us of these things, it might have lessened her authoritarian presence in the world. Or, she might have come home one day to find me with hundreds of paper bags that I might have stolen somewhere.

To my observation, the black middle class has failed to return the expertise and sophistication and resources that they've gained in American society over the past 50 years back to the community,

You have to make your own definition of yourself. That's crucial. When I do interviews, I am expected to become some sociologist. I have to speak to the condition of black America. My preference would be: Let's talk about theater. Let's talk about art. The fact that I am black is self-evident.

assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, which is the blues. And we forget it all.

Black actors are mostly locked out of the house, and there is something dreadfully wrong with that,

to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world -- the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere.