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 write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.
I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.
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.
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.
Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
There’s no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it’s the bible, it’s everything.
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
Don’t you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you.
Everybody in a hurry to slow down.
You can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child.
I don’t need nobody to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself.
Sometimes you’re lucky and you don’t even know it.
You can put law on paper but that don’t make it right.
TROY: Death ain’t nothing. I done seen him. Done wrasled with him. You can’t tell me nothing about death. death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner. And you know what I’ll do to that! Lookee here, Bono... am I lying? You get one of them fastballs, about waist high, over the outside corner of the plate where you can get the meat of the bat on it... and good god! You can kiss it goodbye. Now, am I lying?
You die how you live.
You jumped but I’m falling too.
Love don’t know no age and it don’t know no experience.
Sometimes you find bad luck and good luck in the same place.
I know I got to eat. But I got to live too.