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.
As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
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.
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
I don't have a musical background. But I do enjoy all kinds of music. It's an expression of the human spirit that illuminates our humanity.
I feel sort of embarrassed I don't go to plays, but I can't keep the characters straight. I feel I should be somewhere else.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
I have to confess that I'm not a big movie person. I don't go to a lot of films. And I don't know very much about the history of stage-to-film adaptations.
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.
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
Sometimes you find that your original concept, that initial impulse, was the correct one. Although I keep my own council on this sort of thing, I do ask others for advice sometimes. Like my wife, Constanza Romeo.
Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.
What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.
You can only close if you opened.
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