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" A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing. "

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" A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility. "

George C. Wolfe

Truth

Yourself

Time

" Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them. "

" If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room. "

" The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private. "

" 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

Chance

You

" There are a lot of people who will tell you I'm very ruthless. I'm very fierce. If I feel I'm right, if I feel I've been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell! "

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

" There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.' "

" I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can. "

" To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things. "

" A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work. "

" The black experience, which has nothing to do with my play 'Angels in America,' allowed me to understand the Mormon character. He was the character that couldn't come out to his mother. It allowed me to understand emotional and closeted behavior, because you're so acutely aware of how you're perceived. "

" If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian. "

" I was raised to believe that other people's suffering was my responsibility. "

" 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. "

" 1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories. "

" 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. "

" Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form. "

" There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O'Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of 'The Iceman Cometh.' "

" 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

Past

People

" I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different. "

" I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku. "

" Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself. "

" Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.' "

" I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted. "

" The worst thing when you're working is to say, 'I have a question,' and the other person goes, 'No! This is what it is.' That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating. "

" In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other. "

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

" I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from. "

" The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands. "