Lynn Nottage Quotes

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

You should live in a manner that should enable you to devote time to writing and contemplation. As is often said, the writer is at work even when he is simply looking out the window.

I think I have a very detailed sense of observation. I am interested in the details of people's lives and what information these details give.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

You can't just trust to luck; you have to really listen to what that character is telling you.

I don't meditate in any formal way, but I often lie in bed or find myself in nature and enter into that state of quiet where I get images, feelings, or melodies.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

Most of my songs aren't about me. They're about stuff I've seen.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.

The best thing anybody ever told me about acting - and I think it's probably true for life, generally - is listen. You've really got to watch, and you've really got to listen. Not see and hear.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.