Lynn Nottage Quotes
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Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.
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The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.
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My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.
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The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.
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I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.
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What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
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A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'
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I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.
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I need a release from whatever I'm writing.
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Saying, 'I'm going to create jobs' is great, but before you create jobs, something has to be offered to alleviate some of the suffering now.
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It is such a joy to join a legacy of amazing female playwrights who have managed to break through the glass ceiling and reinvigorate the Broadway stage by bringing a fresh and necessary perspective.
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I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.
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The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.
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I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.
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I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
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In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
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Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.
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I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.
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My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.
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For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.
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When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.
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We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.
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I wrote 'Ruined' and 'Vera Stark' at the same time. That's just how my brain functions - when I'm dwelling someplace very heavy, I need a release.
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In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.