Top 66 Lynn Nottage Quotes

I teach at Columbia, and I’m always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I’m on the train.

Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I’m writing. For ‘Intimate Apparel,’ I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

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.

Ultimately, we’re incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.

When you begin a play, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That’s how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

Broadway is a closed ecosystem.

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

I’m interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.

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.

I know what I’m trying to say, so I’m always open to learning how to say it.

My hobby is raising my children.

I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.

Here’s the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that’s being pre-empted by lockouts. They don’t even have that leverage to protect their jobs.

We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It’s the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.

If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that ‘Ruined’ was very successful at doing that.

‘Intimate Apparel’ is a lyrical meditation on one woman’s loneliness and desire. ‘Fabulation’ is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.

In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life.

If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.

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.

Replace judgment with curiosity.

In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It’s one of the themes of my family.

It’s much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you’re representing people in a truthful way.

I’m a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized… erased from the public record.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.

I feel like ‘Sweat’ arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for ‘Ruined’ or ‘Intimate Apparel’ for many different reasons.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren’t necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.

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.

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There’s a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.

Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

The theatre should reflect America as it’s lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother’s kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother’s large circle of friends.

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.

The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.

Broadway’s never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there’s a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.

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.

Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn’t keep going.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we’ve been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

I love my people’s history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors’ past.

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.

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry’s career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.

I am a storyteller by trade.

What I often do when I’m writing, if I can’t find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

The stage is the last bastion of segregation.

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother’s gaze.

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.

I’m always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.

I don’t think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares. But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless.

It’s very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

My fears about where theater is going – it’s the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters.

I would like there to be gender equity. I would like the Broadway season to reflect sort of the demographic of the country.

As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation.

I’m a schizophrenic writer.

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we’d like the world to be.