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
belly burst butcher capacity churches city claws dared devoured dream europe funeral hard honest hospitals immigrants itself limited man money near nourished offered sewing shops solid tenacious thousand turn until won
Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers' ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and money lenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true.
impossible found hard
I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible....
fire hard home particular rehearsal room sitting
I think that if I'm at home sitting doing the rewrite, I'm going to write something different than if I'm there in the rehearsal room doing it. It's kind of hard to explain, but if you're tossed into the fire at any particular moment, then you are going to write something different than you will in another particular moment. And that is from day to day.
control eye looking picture screen stage tells viewer
The way I see it, the stage tells the story for the ear, and the screen for the eye... On stage, you can't really control where the viewer's eye goes; there's a whole stage picture there, and the viewer can be looking anywhere. But with the camera, if you want the viewer to look at something in particular, you can put their eye there.
america blacks forget slavery wrong
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 locked mostly wrong
Black actors are mostly locked out of the house, and there is something dreadfully wrong with that,
legs stood
I'm standing! I'm standing! My legs stood up!
fool fools-and-foolishness gonna might
I might be a different kind of fool, but I ain't gonna be the same fool twice.
enjoy expression human kinds musical spirit
I don't have a musical background. But I do enjoy all kinds of music. It's an expression of the human spirit that illuminates our humanity.
daddy gonna hands looked older seen sitting staring time
Many is the time I looked at my daddy and seen him staring off at his hands. I got a little older I know what he was thinking. He sitting there saying, "I got these big old hands but what I'm gonna do with them?
anyone aspects black deeper inside modeled voices
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.
imagination imagined robust
I have a robust imagination and I have imagined for myself many things,
black condition definition expected fact preference speak talk
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.
man song taught written
When you look at a fellow, if you taught yourself to look for it, you can see his song written on him. Tell you what kind of man he is in the world.