Lynn Nottage Quotes

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

When I'm working on comics, I have to give myself a million deadlines, or I'd never get anything done. Comics are just so hard to make - I find it very difficult to motivate myself.

The best way for me to procrastinate as a writer is research.

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.

The biggest sacrifice to me is to not be in an atmosphere where I can keep writing and moving forward.

You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.

I know what I'm like when I don't have a project coming up, and that's the mode I'm almost more comfortable in. That's when I get really scrappy and creative.

Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.