Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August WilsonRead
I dropped out of school when I was 15 years old. I dropped out because I guess I wasn't getting anything out of my investment in the school.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a feeling of disillusionment with traditional education and the search for personal growth. It emphasizes the importance of gaining value from one's experiences.
August Wilson reflects on his decision to leave school at a young age, suggesting that he felt he was not receiving sufficient return on the time and effort he invested in his education. This reveals a deeper critique of the conventional schooling system and hints at a quest for knowledge and fulfillment that goes beyond the classroom.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of alternative education paths.
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.
The Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective.
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.
In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
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