When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.

George C. Wolfe

I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.

George C. Wolfe

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.

George C. Wolfe

Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.

George C. Wolfe

Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.

George C. Wolfe

Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.

George C. Wolfe

I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.

George C. Wolfe

There's no place more theatrical than history.

George C. Wolfe

One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you've created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn't necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you're looking for is in the room.

George C. Wolfe

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

George C. Wolfe

I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'

George C. Wolfe

Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.

George C. Wolfe

I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.

George C. Wolfe

I feel like I'm edgy and I'm funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.

George C. Wolfe

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

George C. Wolfe

To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.

George C. Wolfe

The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.

George C. Wolfe

Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.

George C. Wolfe

You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.

George C. Wolfe

Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.

George C. Wolfe

You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.

George C. Wolfe