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

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.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.

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

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.

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