Playwrights From The United States

"I think there is always a need in any struggle for sensationalists. They get the headlines, they get the ear of the public, they take the race horse chances. Ofttimes they are the martyrs, but often they're not even right. You hear them speaking in your behalf and you say, "Yuch. You're not qualified. You know the rhetoric, but you're unprepared." But I don't put them down-except to their faces. If we meet somewhere quietly, say in this room, I'm ruthless. I'll say, "How dare you not take four hours to read up on W.E.B. Du Bois? What makes you talk such bullshit?" But that's privately. If I'm asked publicly, I'll say, "God bless them in their struggle." (1975)"

"I asked if she had any hard feelings about life. "No, I don't. There are many things I wish were better for a number of people for all of us really. We could have such a great time, sharing, laughing, growing, teaching, learning, dying. Coretta King said the greatest violence is seeing a child go to bed hungry. These are the great violences: assaults on the body and soul. Hunger, poverty, fear, dirt, and guilt and I will not have it. That is what my life is about highlighting these things and, hopefully, encouraging others to help make things better. But bitterness about life, no. Life is like electricity; it's just there. You can plug into that electricity and light up a synagogue, or a church, or keep a heart machine going; or you can electrocute a man. Life is the same way. It says, 'Okay, I'm going to be in your unit for a bit. Want to use me? Want to walk around drugged or sick? All right. It's your business. No value judgments! I'm here for you to use.' Life! When it's through with me, I hope to be through with it. I'll tip my hat, and split." (1974)"

"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. (1982; quoted in the Introduction by Jeffrey M. Elliot)"

"I went to sleep last night And I arose with the dawn, I know that there are others Who're still sleeping on, They've gone away, You've let me stay, I want to thank You."

"Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."

"Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide."

"Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?"

"You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise."

"You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise."

"You were a precious pearl How I loved to see you shine, You were the perfect girl. And you were mine. For a time. For a time. Just for a time."

"Many people wonder where my secret lies, I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model size. When I try to show them they think I'm telling lies. I say, it's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curl of my lips I'm Woman, Phenominally . I walk in a room just as cool as you please, And to a man the fellows stand, or fall down on their knees. And then they swarm around me; a hive of honey bees. I say, oh it's the fire in my eyes, the flash of my teeth, the swing in my waist, the joy in my feet. Men themselves have wondered what they see in me. They try so much but they can't touch my inner mystery. When I try to show them they say they still can't see. I say oh, it's in the arch of my back. And now you understand just why my head's not bowed. I don't shout or jump about, or have to talk too loud. When you see me walking out it ought to make you proud. I say it's in the click of my heels. The bend of my hair. The palm of my hands. The need for my care, because I'm a woman. Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman. That's my mother, and all your mothers. And then my grandmothers. And all your grandmothers. And my great grandmothers, And all your great grandmothers. And my great great great, And all your great great... And all you women here, And me."

"Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait."

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

"I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."

"At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."

"You don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking."

"The needs of a society determine its ethics."

"I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.""

"Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else."

"This a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before"

"You develop courage, the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. If you've seen another truth and had enough courage to change your way of thinking, to say "Hey everybody, you know what I said last week? I don't believe that anymore. A little child just straightened me out.""

"Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."

"A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. ... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent."

"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me "I love you." … There is an African saying which is: "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.""

"We delight in the beauty of butterfly, rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty*"

"Don't undervalue irony; it is often of great use."

"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire."

"He dictated beautifully. He had a melodious voice and in some way he seemed to be able to tell if I was falling behind. Typewriting for him was exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano... They seemed to spread out across the page like a beautiful and rambling architecture of this medieval town, to give his work a lonely individuality and a particular place in literature."

"In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a . Within a very few years he could have had a Freudian analysis, traveled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even space travel."

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"Henry James is at once the most and least appreciated figure in American writing. His authority as a novelist of unique quality and as an archetypal American has grown immeasurably in the years since his death, and in some literary circles his name has of late been turned into the password of a cult. But at the same time he is still regarded, in those circles that exert the major influence on popular education and intelligence, with the coldness and even derision that he encountered in the most depressed period of his career, when his public deserted him and he found himself almost alone."

"James's repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel."

"I am reading another Henry James called The Ambassadors the man is uncanny the way he unravels a psychological situation. He writes in about five dimensions – and in that gorgeous convoluted style which, if you give it your closest attention, is nevertheless not obscure."

"After a luncheon party of which he had been, as they say, "the life", we happened to be drinking our coffee together while the rest of the party had moved on to the verandah. "What a charming picture they make," he said, with his great head aslant, "the women there with their embroidery, the..." There was nothing in his words, anybody might have spoken them; but in his attitude, in his voice, in his whole being at that moment, I divined such complete detachment that I was startled into speaking out of myself. "I can't bear to look at life like that," I blurted out, "I want to be in everything. Perhaps that is why I cannot write, it makes me feel absolutely alone..." The effect of this confession upon him was instantaneous and surprising. He leant forward and grasped my arm excitedly; "Yes, it is solitude. If it runs after you and catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it. It is absolute solitude." And he got up hurriedly and joined the others."

"To listen to him was like watching an artist at work; the ample phrases slowly uncoiled, with much pausing and hesitating for the choice word, and out of them was gradually constructed the impression of the scene or the idea in his mind; when it was finished the listener was in possession of a characteristic product of Henry James's art. It was hardly to be called conversation, perhaps; it was too magnificent, too deliberate, for the give-and-take of a mixed gathering; but his companionable humour, his quick sensibility, his ornate and affectionate courtesy, set it further still from any appearance of formality or display. Though in any company he was certain to be the dominant, preponderant figure, his interest and his participation in the life around him were unfailing, and he seemed to have the gift of creating a special, unique relation with every one who came his way."

"Even the most enthusiastic admirers of James's later work have sometimes felt that the importance of his subjects was hardly equal to the immense elaboration of his treatment of them—a judgement more crudely expressed by saying that ‘nothing happens’ in his books, for all their densely packed extent. It is true that his central theme, baldly stated, is often a small affair, and that he seldom allows a glimpse of the fiercer passions that are the common stock-in-trade of the novelist. But this criticism implies some misunderstanding of his view of a subject—the importance of which he held to depend primarily on the value, the intelligence, and the sensibility, of the people involved. An event is nothing in itself; the question is what a fine mind will make of it; and more and more, in James's books, the characters tended to become men and women of rare and acute perception, capable of making the utmost of all their experience. A very simple theme, entrusted to a few such people, would give him more than enough for dramatic development; and if their deeper feelings remain all but hidden under the delicate surface-play of their reflections and reactions, it was because the last results and furthest implications of a thing were to him always more significant, more charged with history, than the thing itself in its nakedness could possibly be. Hence his dislike of the raw, the crude, the staring, his love of the toned and seasoned and civilized, both in literature and in life."

"His sensitive appreciation of the minute distinctions, the fine shades, the all but inaudible tones, in the intercourse of very civilized people, together with his now complete mastery of his craft, began to give his work the strange and deeply individual aspect which it wore increasingly to the end. His style, matching the extreme subtlety of his perceptions and discriminations, developed an intricacy which might sometimes appear perversely obscure, though at its best it is really the simple expression of the effects he sought—suggestive, evocative effects, that gradually shape out a solid impression."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry."

"James's earlier work had often substituted a character's impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more - they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well."

"... A page of Mr James's later novels is like some vast, high-lifted park, exposing its densely-clad slopes to the rays of a late sun, embossed with the domes of verdure of a hundred shades of green, elms, oaks, and beeches contrasting with dusky pines and the slender silvery poplars of France the whole slope drinking, absorbing the light, blending and fusing its myriad tones and shades. Eidullia, little pictures of an infinite grace, come, as in Dante, to enhance the distinguished charm of the composition."

"I took H.J. to a secluded seat, and we had a talk... I questioned him about his ways of work. He admitted that he worked every day, dictated every morning, and began a new book the instant the old one was finished. He said it was his only chance because he worked so slowly, and excised so much. I asked him when the inception and design of a new book was formed; and he gave no satisfactory answer to this except to roll his eyes, to wave his hand about, to pat my knee and to say, "It's all about, it's about —— it's in the air —— it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.""

"It took me years to ascertain that Henry James' work was giving me little pleasure: In each case I ask myself: "What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?" Question unanswerable! I gave up. To-day I have no recollection whatever of any characters of any events in either novel."

"I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity."

"(What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society. (Are there any white writers you would describe as witnesses?) Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Proust."

"The book was very hard to write because I was too young when I started, seventeen; it was really about me and my father. There were things I couldn't deal with technically at first. Most of all, I couldn't deal with me. This is where reading Henry James helped me, with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story. He gave me the idea to make the novel happen on John's birthday…The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust-why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?"

"It's not that he "bites off more than he can chaw," as T. G. Appleton said of Nathan, but he chaws more than he bites off."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Ideas are, in truth, force."