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.

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

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

I found out life's hard but it ain't impossible.

. . . 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 are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours.

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