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.
If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud. But really, Marilla, the flying part is glorious as long as it lasts. . . it's like soaring through a sunset. I think it almost pays for the thud.
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
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