August Wilson
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"August Wilson" was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prize for Drama/Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century.

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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.

The harder you try to hold onto them, the easier it is for some gal to pull them away.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

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.