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.

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.

What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?

. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.

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

Suffice it to say, I'm not poor.

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