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
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.
In practice
In a discussion about the value of personal expression in the arts.
Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.
My whole artistic life has always been about change, change, change, move on, move on. It's the only thing I find interesting.
Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.
Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.
Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile.
A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.
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