Two quotes from renowned playwrights have informed much of my thinking as a playwright. The first is by August Wilson in a 1987 interview at the Dramatists Guild, New York City, during a symposium I attended. He said that he started as a poet, soon imitating the voice of Dylan Thomas. But that was no achievement to him because he had not yet discovered the voice of August Wilson. His transformative moment came one night at his typewriter as he was listening to a Bessie Smith song. Then he realized that American Blacks, having been forbidden access to literacy, founded their literary tradition through the blues because song was not denied them. This epiphany led to his writing "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom". This comment reminds me that as a playwright, I must continually engage in a conscious, honest search for what it means to be alive. I try to reflect this approach in my work through the themes I explore and the characters I create. The second quote comes from Harold Pinter, who said in his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, "When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us." This wisdom compels me as a playwright to always test my assumptions about the world, realizing that each of us has the capacity to triumph over remarkable situations through courageous, selfless acts of love, and to descend into immorality through traitorous, cowardly acts of violence. Our struggle as human beings is to confront both of those sides, to see how others see us behind the mirror, not merely to see in the distorted reflection of a mirror only what we want. I may not always succeed in conveying the creative process as Wilson saw it and the human condition as Pinter saw it, but my plays have always been an attempt to reach these realities.