There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

The great thing about doing theater is that you get to do it better the next night.

If I'm not going to get a part, tell me why.

[Wilson may never see the marquee or sit in the theater that carries his name. Last month, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he announced that he was dying of liver cancer, with three to five months to live. He disclosed it with the type of plainspoken grit one of his heroic characters might admire.] I've lived a blessed life, ... I'm ready.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.