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.
Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.
The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.
The ignorant man never enjoys.
Don't take too seriously all that the neighbors say. Don't be overawed by what the experts say. Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense.
It is likely that human beings will find fulfillment and will be rewarded for the same qualities that they have been rewarded for for 5,000 years. And that is intelligence, hard work, honesty, a sense of character, loyalty to family and friends, and above all, love and faith. If you are trying to decide what you should do, those are the things you should do. And you know it.
Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values.
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