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.

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

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.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

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

All of art is a search for ways of being, of living life more fully.