Lynn Nottage Quotes

I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

Directing plays lacked the immediacy and connection to real world events that journalism offered; journalism lacked the drama, theatricality and subjective storytelling of theater. It wasn't until I had the idea of making a documentary film about the 1992 presidential campaign that these two passions came together in 'The War Room.'

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.

Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

Writing plays, I've always felt a little like I'm guessing - less sure of what's good and what's not good. I think that's because it's not a complete work of art.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.

Creating is one thing; telling the story is one thing. I see myself more as a storyteller than a story creator.

Whether it's theatre or TV or film, you're hoping you're going to bump into a writer that's got a bit of honour in him, that wants to tell a good story and is able to tell it well.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

I think Jack Thorne is an exceptional writer.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.