Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August WilsonRead
I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating art for oneself rather than for external validation.
August Wilson expresses the idea that true artistry stems from a personal connection and satisfaction in the creative process. Just as Picasso painted for his own fulfillment, Wilson believes that an artist's primary audience should be themselves, highlighting the intrinsic value of self-expression in art.
Themes
ArtSelfCreationExpressionAudience
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the value of personal expression in the arts.
More from August Wilson
All quotes →I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.
August WilsonRead
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
August WilsonRead
I do - very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, 'September Song.'
August WilsonRead
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
August WilsonRead
When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
August WilsonRead
Similar quotes
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
Stan LeeRead
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, to see it quite naked, in a way.
Muriel BarberyRead
The arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals. The arts can enrich all of our communities and the country. And the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can.
Michelle ObamaRead
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre LordeRead
Adornment, what a science! Beauty, what a weapon! Modesty, what elegance!
Coco ChanelRead
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Stephen KingRead