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.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

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

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.

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?

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.