I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it’s not my play.
The director works as an interpretive artist, but he’s still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.
Life don’t owe you nothing.
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 -.
You are responsible for the world that you live in.
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.
You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.
Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.
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.
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.
I found out life’s hard but it ain’t impossible...
I know some things when I start. I know, let’s say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it’s going to be about a piano, but that’s it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
Suffice it to say, I’m not poor.
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It’s hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.
If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.
As soon as white folks say a play’s good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.