Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August WilsonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of authenticity and respect in representing voices in art.
August Wilson reflects on his journey as a playwright, acknowledging that his initial inability to write authentic dialogue stemmed from a lack of respect for the way black people communicate. It highlights the necessity of valuing and honoring the unique perspectives and voices of characters, which allows for a more genuine artistic expression that resonates with truth and integrity.
Themes
AuthenticityArtDialogueRespectCharacter
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about diversity in the arts, one might quote this to emphasize the need for authentic representation.
More from August Wilson
All quotes →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.
August WilsonRead
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.
August WilsonRead
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.'
August WilsonRead
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.
August WilsonRead
My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
August WilsonRead
Similar quotes
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
Ben OkriRead
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John CheeverRead
From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
P. G. WodehouseRead
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
Francis Ford CoppolaRead
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
Tom RobbinsRead
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'KeeffeRead