Suzan-Lori Parks Quotes & Sayings

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Difficulty creates the opportunity for self-reflection and compassion.”