Difficulty creates the opportunity for self-reflection and compassion.

Each moment is perfect and heaven-sent, in that each moment holds the seeds for growth.

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

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.

I don't read reviews. I refuse to have my ego inflated or deflated by someone I don't know.

I learned that if we embrace what's happening, we are also embracing what is possible - and a road opens up for God to meet us halfway.

I like to give and get basically anything (I love to read) but especially fiction and poetry.

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

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

One could get locked in by the Pulitzer, thinking, 'This is who I am.' Doors open with it, but doors in your mind could close.

Being a playwright of any race is difficult, and Lord knows it gets more difficult the further you get from the middle of the road. I don't know what kind of magic my mojo is working, but it's working.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

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.

I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.

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, there's a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.

Someone yelled at me once, 'You never write about yourself.' People used to get so mad at me for that. But my definition of myself is completely up for grabs. I'm everywhere, just like we all are.

The problem for me is being labeled anything. People assume, 'Oh, she is interested in language.' So when we notice she's interested in character, then she's made a big change, instead of, 'she's always been interested in character.' If we can allow painters to have different periods... then we can allow playwrights to have different periods, too.

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.

The writing of 'Topdog' was a great gift. I feel the play came to me because I realized that my circumstances, while causing me despair and heartbreak, also held great possibility, if only I could see it.