Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.

My father was in the Army and we moved around a lot, and one of my favorite places was the library.

The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich.

Quality is like quantity, but there's a lot less of it.

My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship - the idea that black people are from outer space, theres a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.

I don't consciously start writing a play that involves issues. After it's done, I sit back like everyone else and think about what it means.