Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a schizophrenic writer.
Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
Replace judgment with curiosity.
I try to be led by my curiosity.
There's never any ebb in human misery.
I think of myself as a healing artist.
Silence is complicity. I believe that.
I need a release from whatever I'm writing.
We use metaphors to express our own truths.
The stage is the last bastion of segregation.
I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.
For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.
Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.
I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.
For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.
Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.
American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.
By the time I reached 50, I'd accumulated many unresolved fears and desires.
Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.
I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
Just because it’s a unique perspective doesn’t mean it can’t offer something universal.
I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.
The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.
The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.
A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.
By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.
Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.
Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.
We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.
I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.
Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train.
I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.
In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It's one of the themes of my family.
The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.
In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.
The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.
I would like there to be gender equity. I would like the Broadway season to reflect sort of the demographic of the country.
I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.
In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.
My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.