Lynn Nottage Quotes

'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

I thought I was an odd person, and since my hometown had only about 70,000 people in it, I knew I was going to have to leave there and go out and find other odd people.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.

When I first moved to London, I felt very homesick and yearned after the countryside a lot. Because London's hard. It's a big place, and it's lonely. It takes a while to get into it. But once I got into the flow of it and started to grow up, I realised that my home is wherever I am.

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

I started watching so many different types of women, saw all the complexities of them, all the ways and the look and shapes they could be, and I felt it was missing for me in American film. I didn't see anybody I was watching in movies that felt like me. I felt rather tortured and lonely about it.

I'm interested in telling a story about a gay man and what he's going through as an artist and as a lonely, single gay man. I want to reveal what I know about loneliness.

When I was a kid, dealing with trying to discover myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't have any Internet and didn't have any friends. You felt very alone and very frightened.

I think 'Speech & Debate' surprised people because it's a play about teenagers that took the teenagers very seriously. They are very real. People wanted to see if they identified with one of the kids, that loneliness, that yearning for something bigger. That feeling of being stuck, it's very adolescent, but those kinds of feelings linger on.

Yes, I do seek solitude, but I am never lonely.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I didn't really have the personal agency to express it.

I thought it was great being the only girl in the room. I loved the attention. After I got used to it, I didn't want to be the only girl in the room. I had no one to talk to.

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?

Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.

Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.

When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.

Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.

I was bad at sports and picked last every day. I couldn't quite figure out what my role was in the social order, so I decided I was interested in comedy. And what was then interesting was, nobody else was interested in it at all. I didn't find one friend who was interested in comedy until I moved to California and met other comedians. And suddenly I knew hundreds of people who knew as much about SCTV as I did. But it took me 20 years to find those people.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone." "What do you fear then?" he asked her. She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words. "Never finding myself again.