Lynn Nottage Quotes

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

Henry is entirely invented though by now I feel he's as real as anyone I know.

I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.

I like writers who can show me worlds I know nothing about, but my favorites are those who create characters or worlds which feel realistic and familiar to me, or who can make me feel inspired.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

Whatever you put in your listing, make sure that it's a true representation of the property and it's not dishonest.

Anything in which you're playing someone real does make you feel responsible for making the story as true as it can be.

There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.