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Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

I don't think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares. But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless.

The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.

There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage.

I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It's one of the themes of my family.

'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.

Who wants to see the same play again? I certainly don't want to write the same play again and again.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters.

The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.

There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It's not just war and famine all the time.

Saying, 'I'm going to create jobs' is great, but before you create jobs, something has to be offered to alleviate some of the suffering now.

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.

We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It's the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.

There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

Here's the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that's being pre-empted by lockouts. They don't even have that leverage to protect their jobs.

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.

'Ruined' was a play which was somewhat of an anomaly in that I did not take a commission until it was finished because I really wanted to explore the subject matter unencumbered. Otherwise, I felt as though I'd have the voice of dramaturges and literary managers saying, 'This is great, but we'll never be able to produce it.'

It's very easy, when we're reading those articles on the 20th page of 'The New York Times,' to distance ourselves and say, 'It's someone else.'

I'm a schizophrenic writer.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.

My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.

I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway.

I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.

In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.

There's never any ebb in human misery.

My hobby is raising my children.

By the time I reached 50, I'd accumulated many unresolved fears and desires.

Growing up in New York City, I'd flirted with the idea of driving, but between the subway and the sidewalks, I'd never needed to learn.

I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.

Broadway is a closed ecosystem.

If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train.

I would like there to be gender equity. I would like the Broadway season to reflect sort of the demographic of the country.

Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.

It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get it to the people.

It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.

When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.

My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.

For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.

The stage is the last bastion of segregation.

The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

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