Lynn Nottage Quotes

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

If there's an opportunity to tell a story through acting or directing or cinematography or a book, I will embrace that opportunity.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

In my free time, I'd written 'Sammy's Hill' - it had started out as a play. I just did it for myself.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

Acting and writing go together. Actors write because they love words and becoming other people - we love to escape into other characters.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.

It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.