Suzan-Lori Parks Quotes

Everybody's got a Hole. Ain't nobody ever lived who don't got a Hole in them somewheres. When I say Hole you know what I'm talking about, dontcha? Soft spot, sweet spot, opening, blind spot, Itch, Gap, call it what you want but I call it a Hole. To get the best of a situation you gotta know a man's Hole. Everybody's got one, just don't everybody got one in the same place.

Some got a Hole in they head. Now, you may think "Hole in the head" is just another way of saying stupid, but "Hole in the head" means more than that. It means they got a lack and a craving for knowledge. Not just the lack, now, but the craving too. A man could have a Hole just about anywheres: in the head, in the wallet (which means he burns his money), in the pocket (which means he don't got no money to burn but would like some), in the pants, in the guts, in the stomach, in the heart. You offer a person with a Hole in the head some knowledge and they gonna be in yr pocket cause you done gived him the opportunity to taste what he craves, but if a person's got a Hole in they heart and you offer them knowledge, you won't be able to sway them none. A Hole-in-the-heart person craves company and kindness, not no book.

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.

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

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 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 knew that I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life: that instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity, I should work toward a realization that every opportunity is perfect.

Overweight southern senators are easy targets. They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to willfully ignore our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which--evil senators or no--will be the death of the arts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Quality is like quantity, but there's a lot less of it.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

Some people think I am an issue-oriented writer, but I've never said to myself, I'm gong to write about such-and-such an issue - that would make for incredibly boring writing, at least to my taste. Creating someone I don't know and her made-up world shows us more about who we are - is actually a better mirror - than if I were to parade in front of you an instantly recognizable person in an instantly recognizable situation. I'm not saying, Let's make it all abstract and weird and difficult and thereby you will know more about yourself. My process is much more organic than that.

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

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.

History is time that won't quit.

Difficulty creates the opportunity for self-reflection and compassion.