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August Wilson Quotes

August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each work in the series is set in a different decade, and depicts comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. April 1945 – 2. October 2005   •   Other names August Wilson

Works

Fences
Fences
August Wilson
Gem of the Ocean
August Wilson
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson
August Wilson: 13   quotes 2   likes

Famous August Wilson Quotes

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”

August Wilson

“I ain't never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.”

August Wilson Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Source: Joe Turner's Come and Gone

“In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

August Wilson Gem of the Ocean

Source: Gem of the Ocean

“You die how you live.”

August Wilson Gem of the Ocean

Gem of the Ocean

“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 Fences

Source: Fences

August Wilson Quotes

“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”

August Wilson The Piano Lesson

Source: The Piano Lesson

Family

“When the sins of our fathers visit us
We do not have to play host.
We can banish them with forgiveness
As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.”

August Wilson Fences

Source: Fences

God , Law , Forgiveness

“When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave room for me.”

August Wilson Fences

Source: Fences

Housing

“The real struggle has been since Africans first set foot on the continent, an affirmation of the value of one’s self. And I think if, in order to participate in American society, in order to accomplish some of the things which the black middle class has accomplished, if you have had to give up that self in order to accomplish that, then you are not making an affirmation of the value of the African being. You are saying that in order to do that I must become someone else, I must become like someone else…”

August Wilson

On the cultural sacrifices made by African Americans in higher classes in “Playwright August Wilson on Writing About Black America” https://billmoyers.com/story/august-wilson-on-writing-about-black-america/ (Bill Moyers, 1988)

Self-confidence , Thinking , Making love

“Jazz in itself is not struggling…That is, the music itself is not struggling. It and the baseball history you talk about are two anchors of the African American cultural community. It’s the attitude that’s in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.”

August Wilson

On not tossing certain facets of African American culture as relics in “AN INTERVIEW WITH AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT AUGUST WILSON” https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25048/Tibbetts_AugustWIlson_2002.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y (John C. Tibbetts, 2002)

Music , Forgetting , History , Communication

“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. 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

On what attracted him to theater in “August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/839/august-wilson-the-art-of-theater-no-14-august-wilson in The Paris Review (Winter 1999)

Time , Reading , Personality , People

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