Top 50 August Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.”

— August Wilson

3. “The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.”

— August Wilson

4. “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.”

— August Wilson

5. “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

6. “I may be personable, but I assure you I am a lion.”

— August Wilson

7. “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.”

— August Wilson

8. “All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.”

— August Wilson

9. “Life don’t owe you nothing.”

— August Wilson

10. “Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.”

— August Wilson

11. “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.”

— August Wilson

12. “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.”

— August Wilson

13. “You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.”

— August Wilson

14. “Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.”

— August Wilson

15. “All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it’s the bible, it’s everything.”

— August Wilson

16. “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

17. “You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.”

— August Wilson

18. “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.”

— August Wilson

19. “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.”

— August Wilson

20. “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

21. “You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.”

— August Wilson

22. “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?”

— August Wilson

23. “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

24. “What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?”

— August Wilson

25. “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.”

— August Wilson

26. “Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.”

— August Wilson

27. “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.”

— August Wilson

28. “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.”

— August Wilson

29. “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.”

— August Wilson

30. “I found out life’s hard but it ain’t impossible...”

— August Wilson

31. “Suffice it to say, I’m not poor.”

— August Wilson

32. “Everybody in a hurry to slow down.”

— August Wilson

33. “You are responsible for the world that you live in.”

— August Wilson

34. “Style ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.”

— August Wilson

35. “I don’t need nobody to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself.”

— August Wilson

36. “You can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child.”

— August Wilson

37. “All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.”

— August Wilson

38. “Love don’t know no age and it don’t know no experience.”

— August Wilson

39. “There’s no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.”

— August Wilson

40. “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.”

— August Wilson

41. “Sometimes you’re lucky and you don’t even know it.”

— August Wilson

42. “Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.”

— August Wilson

43. “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.”

— August Wilson

44. “If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.”

— August Wilson

45. “My influences have been what I call my four Bs – the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.”

— August Wilson

46. “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.”

— August Wilson

47. “I don’t write for a particular audience.”

— August Wilson

48. “You can put law on paper but that don’t make it right.”

— August Wilson

49. “I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.”

— August Wilson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

50. “Sometimes you find bad luck and good luck in the same place.”

— August Wilson