Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

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.

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.

All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.

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

I don't write for a particular audience.

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.