Lynn Nottage Quotes
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The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.
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I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.
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By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.
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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 people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.
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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 need a release from whatever I'm writing.
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There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It's not just war and famine all the time.
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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 do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.
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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'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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Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.
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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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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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I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.
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I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
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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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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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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.
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Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
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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.