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

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

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.

Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.

I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.