Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
Interpretation
Embrace your struggles because they can lead to personal growth and creativity.
August Wilson's quote speaks to the transformative power of pain and adversity. It suggests that our challenges, often represented as 'demons,' can inspire us and bring forth our inner strengths, depicted as 'angels.' By using our struggles as motivation, we can create something beautiful or meaningful from the turmoil in our lives.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one could reference this quote to encourage listeners to face their challenges.
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 influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
The only time I waste is time I spend doing something that, in my gut, I know I shouldn't. If I choose to spend time playing video games or sleeping in, then it's time well spent, because I chose to do it. I did it for a reason - to relax, to decompress or to feel good, and that was what I wanted to do.
The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Instead of asking "whatβs the problem?" ask "what's the creative opportunity?
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