Lynn Nottage

I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

— Lynn Nottage

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

— Lynn Nottage

I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.

— Lynn Nottage

I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.

— Lynn Nottage

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

— Lynn Nottage

By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.

— Lynn Nottage

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

— Lynn Nottage

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.

— Lynn Nottage

Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.

— Lynn Nottage

Growing up in New York City, I'd flirted with the idea of driving, but between the subway and the sidewalks, I'd never…

— Lynn Nottage

It is such a joy to join a legacy of amazing female playwrights who have managed to break through the glass ceiling…

— Lynn Nottage

My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has…

— Lynn Nottage

I want the audience, when they leave, to think of the characters on the stage in three dimensions. I want them to…

— Lynn Nottage

It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get…

— Lynn Nottage

It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to…

— Lynn Nottage

I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has…

— Lynn Nottage

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you…

— Lynn Nottage

When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been…

— Lynn Nottage

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of…

— Lynn Nottage

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are…

— Lynn Nottage

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce.…

— Lynn Nottage

People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a…

— Lynn Nottage

My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial…

— Lynn Nottage

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the…

— Lynn Nottage

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries.…

— Lynn Nottage

Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.

— Lynn Nottage

Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.

— Lynn Nottage

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

— Lynn Nottage

I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.

— Lynn Nottage

A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.

— Lynn Nottage

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.

— Lynn Nottage

Just because it’s a unique perspective doesn’t mean it can’t offer something universal.

— Lynn Nottage

By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.

— Lynn Nottage

The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.

— Lynn Nottage

The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.

— Lynn Nottage

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

— Lynn Nottage

It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

— Lynn Nottage

'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.

— Lynn Nottage

There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation…

— Lynn Nottage

I remain committed to telling the stories of women of the African diaspora, particularly those stories that don't often find their way…

— Lynn Nottage