Lynn Nottage Quotes

I try to make all my songs good. I don't ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response.

I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

The fact is I'm not making a film in order to draw pictures or make images about Iran.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

I like to make broader strokes with politics in my work.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

These pictures possibly give rise to questions of political content or historical truth. Neither interests me in this instance. And although even my motivation for painting them is probably of no significance, I am trying to put a name to it here, as an articulation, parallel to the pictures, as it were, of my disquiet and of my opinion.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

A playwright can drop a little acid in the water and it washes away a lot of rust.

When somebody asks me what a song or a line is about, I feel like I'm not done writing it yet.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

When I create and write for TV, I build universes that will have arcs lasting seasons, whereas theatre allows me to explore storylines that will open up for two hours or less. Both are wonderfully fulfilling, but they couldn't be more different.

I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.

The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.

If you want to be in Hollywood, and if you want to make big international movies, you have to be able to make movies that don't have anything to do with social status or politics. To limit yourself to just do these little small movies and call it black cinema itself is a mistake to me.

I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.

It's not my responsibility to write plays about the way the world should be.

When I write songs, I write from a lot of perspectives.

We're not scientific comedians, thinking like, 'Things have moved on, we need to do this, we need to reflect the world in this way.'

When I make my socially conscious songs, I go hard with the lyrical content; I go hard with the imagery.

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.