Quotes from Lynn Nottage

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

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

The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.

I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.

I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

Replace judgment with curiosity.

I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.

I'm a schizophrenic writer.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white.

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

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

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

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

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.