Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.
courageself-knowledgeselfawarenessstrength
It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.
Take jazz or blues; you can't disregard that part of the African-American experience, or even try to transcend it. They are affirmations and celebrations of the value and worth of the African-American spirit. And young people would do well to understand them as the roots of today's rap, rather than some antique to be tossed away.
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.
tso-love
Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, which is the blues. And we forget it all.
I have to confess that I'm not a big movie person. I don't go to a lot of films. And I don't know very much about the history of stage-to-film adaptations.
Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.
The harder you try to hold onto them, the easier it is for some gal to pull them away.
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
historymusictrouble
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.
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.
belongingfamily
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
experience
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
character