Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August WilsonRead
I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff, I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of gathering and organizing ideas to understand and utilize them effectively.
August Wilson's quote reflects the creative process of writing and idea generation, highlighting that the act of accumulating thoughts is essential for eventually making sense of them. By collecting a variety of inputs and later analyzing them, one can create meaningful work and make informed decisions based on the ideas generated over time.
In practice
An artist sharing this quote to inspire fellow creatives during a workshop.
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.
One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.
Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.
As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself, 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff?' This set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how a poor washerwoman was going to better my condition.
Self confidence is the ability to exercise restraint in the face of disrespect and still show respect in response.
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