Lynn Nottage Quotes

For me, the key is always trying to find the connection between the audience and the character I'm playing. That's important to me, in any work I do.

. . . I felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience . . .. To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.

I don't try to intellectualize characters too much. But I always think of the audience. I always make sure that my characters are likeable.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.

I always want the audience to identify with my character in some way. I mean, sometimes you'll get characters that aren't very identifiable. Sometimes you can't relate to your character at all.

I think there's a bit of me in every character. Basically it just depends on what happens with the character.

The audience can feel the subtleties of the characters.

At a certain age you start becoming brave enough to reveal yourself and it's the revealing of who you are that enables you to dig deeper into different characters. You'll get to a point where you can say: 'I can relate to that', 'I know that', 'I don't have to make that up' and that resonates with people in the audience who can tell that you've been there.

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.

I'm often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don't think I've actually cried watching myself.

I think everybody should act! I would encourage everybody to do one thing, join a theater class or something. It's so good to take a character that you think is wildly different from who you are, and to try to relate to that person and become that person is very helpful. It's hard to articulate what you learn, but you can feel the effect of these characters that you play and take with you.

If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

When you're looking for a house, you're not looking for a house that's perfect. You're looking for that house to have character. And I think it's those little bits of humanity they come from the music. That's what the music brings out when you have that, it brings out the character of a song. You go back and listen to 30, 40 years of music, and all the great, great songs that we've had in our lives, they all have that character. They have that human nudge, they all have that human relation. You can relate to it.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

I really think one of the greatest allies you can have is the imagination of your audience.

You make a movie to entertain audiences. That's why you make a movie. The product sales is because people love the characters, and to me, that is a testament to how our movie has become so ingrained in family's homes all around the world and that's why I make movies.

I think you're always afraid when you go into like a big superhero movie that it's gonna be kinda just action and you're not gonna be able to just really go to the bottom of the characters.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.

Embrace reality. Think about what delights you - the small luxuries on which you depend, the people whom you cherish most. But remember that they have their own distinct character, which is quite a separate matter from how we happen to regard them.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.