My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.

I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.

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

I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.

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.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.