Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking. August Wilson Read Quote
I don’t look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do – the wellspring of art, or what I do – l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I’m working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people. August Wilson Read Quote
Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in ‘The Cosby Show,’ because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values. August Wilson Read Quote
I do – very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, ‘September Song.’ August Wilson Read Quote
Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don’t claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live. August Wilson Read Quote
I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures. August Wilson Read Quote
I dropped out of school, but I didn’t drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world… I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months. August Wilson Read Quote
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter. August Wilson Read Quote
