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.
Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That’s all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?
Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.
You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government’s responsibility. It is not your school’s or your social club’s or your church’s or your neighbor’s or your fellow citizen’s. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours.
Style ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.
I’m a black American playwright. I couldn’t be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they’re all cut out of the same cloth. That’s who I am; that’s who I write about.
You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.
Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.
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 influences have been what I call my four Bs – the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.